On Pluto, the Sun is only a spectacularly bright star. It’s easy to pick out, hanging low in the sky—only just visible in the domed window in the hub of Sagacity Station. If Mariam could reach up and hold back the Sun, if she could slow its progress down the sky, she would. She can’t, of course. Just another bead to add to the strand of impossibilities hung around her neck.

A scuff on the floor behind her breaks her gaze from the starfield overhead. Captain Valencia stands there, waiting. The pale fluorescent light from the station walls disappears into the hard, dark planes of his face. His forehead is Tombaugh Regio, the deep valleys of his cheeks are the shadows at the foot of Wright Mons. All the contrast of Pluto’s surface, but not nearly so cold. His eyes are molten puddles in the shadow of his brow and Mariam realizes he’s talking to her: “You don’t have to go out today. You can stay by the radio, if you like.”

[Full story after the cut.]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip Episode 61! This is your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to share this story with you. Today we have a reprint of “To Touch the Sun Before it Fades” by Aimee Ogden

This story is part of the new GlitterShip issue that is now available. The Spring 2018 issue of GlitterShip is available for purchase at glittership.com/buy and on Kindle, Nook, and Kobo. If you’re a Patreon supporter, you should have access to the new issue waiting for you when you log in. The new issue is only $2.99 and all of our back issues are now $1.49.

GlitterShip is also a part of the Audible Trial Program. This means that just by listening to GlitterShip, you are eligible for a free 30 day membership on Audible, and a free audiobook to keep.

If you’re looking for an excellent queer book to listen to, check out Anger is a Gift by Mark Oshiro, which is a YA novel about Oakland teens who decide to fight back against the oppressive system forced on them both in school and out.

Aimee Ogden is a former science teacher and software tester; now she writes stories about sad astronauts and angry princesses. Her work can also be found in Shimmer, Apex, and Escape Pod.

“To Touch the Sun Before it Fades” is narrated by Rae White.

Rae White is a non-binary poet, writer, and zinester living in Brisbane. Their poetry collection Milk Teeth won the 2017 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and is published by the University of Queensland Press. Rae’s poem ‘what even r u?’ placed second in the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize. Rae’s poetry has been published in Meanjin Quarterly,Cordite Poetry Review, Overland, Rabbit, and others.

To Touch the Sun Before it Fades

by Aimee Ogden

Mariam watches a week of night roll toward her.

On Pluto, the Sun is only a spectacularly bright star. It’s easy to pick out, hanging low in the sky—only just visible in the domed window in the hub of Sagacity Station. If Mariam could reach up and hold back the Sun, if she could slow its progress down the sky, she would. She can’t, of course. Just another bead to add to the strand of impossibilities hung around her neck.

A scuff on the floor behind her breaks her gaze from the starfield overhead. Captain Valencia stands there, waiting. The pale fluorescent light from the station walls disappears into the hard, dark planes of his face. His forehead is Tombaugh Regio, the deep valleys of his cheeks are the shadows at the foot of Wright Mons. All the contrast of Pluto’s surface, but not nearly so cold. His eyes are molten puddles in the shadow of his brow and Mariam realizes he’s talking to her: “You don’t have to go out today. You can stay by the radio, if you like.”

She could. But she’s not sure what would be worse: to miss the call, out on the ice. Or to sit there with folded hands while the hours unwind, waiting for a message that never comes.

She’s not sure either that she even wants them to call right now. What could she possibly say to Jef and Baily? Her own husband and wife are very nearly strangers to her now. And what could she tell Annika: to buck up, be strong, stiff upper lip? Mariam doesn’t know how to talk to two-year-olds at all, let alone under such circumstances. There are no words that would help them right now anyway. Four billion miles between her and earth mean that she’s useless to them no matter what she does, no matter where she goes. They have each other, and that will have to be enough. Isn’t it? Sometimes Mariam thinks it’s too easy out here to let the distance and the silence speak for her. She is no better of a wife out here than she was back home.

But at least Mariam can help the rest of her crew today. That would be something of worth. “I’ll go out,” she says. Her voice is steady, and her gaze too. Valencia’s head jerks, a quick nod. For a moment she thinks he’s going to say something else, and she braces for impact. But then he turns his head and walks away, and air hisses from the seals in his helmet hisses as he snaps it into place.

Today is Char’s turn to stay behind at Sagacity, and they promise to patch any calls through if they do come in. Inside her helmet, Mariam nods, then realizes the gesture is invisible to Char. She thanks them for the gesture, but Char only shrugs her off. “It’s nothing,” they say, but that’s not true. Char’s good at knowing the right words, and reaches out to others when Mariam would stay quiet. Mariam has poured out enough silence over the years. She wonders how Char always just knows, but she has never found the words to ask.

Cool starlight rains down on the crew as they drift through the airlock and out into a Plutonian twilight. Cool starlight, and one frozen chip of sunlight mixed in with the rest as it slides down toward Pluto. Six days of day, then six of night; not that there’s much difference between night and day out here. The crew keeps Sagacity’s clocks set to the same time as what they left behind in Cape Canaveral, where it should currently be a hazy eighty-five degrees. Here, it’s two hundred and seventy-five below. Sometimes Mariam imagines what would happen if her suit ruptured. She pictures herself as a pillar of ice, tipping forward. When she shatters inside her suit, Pluto’s empty atmosphere does not carry the sound.

Mariam helps Captain Valencia and Yance pack the Pilgrim’s engines with frozen methane, and then buckles in for the rough ride over the frozen surface of Sputnik Planum. Where are Baily and Jef right now? What are they feeling? What were they doing four and a half hours ago? Mariam can’t imagine they would take the time to sit down by a microphone on the Cape. Not right now. She stares into the bright diamond of sunlight that hovers over the horizon and wonders if they’re thinking of her at all in those interstitial moments. She knows she’s thinking of them. But do they know that?

Captain Valencia and Yance want to check the cameras while they’re way out here on the plain anyway; Camera 7 has begun to tilt on its axis and needs to be stabilized if they’re going to capture the glacier flow that Mission Command is so keen on. They find the entire apparatus listing pitifully. One of the joints in a tripod leg refuses to latch. Yance blames the cold, the shoddy manufacturing, the quality of the materials, the long transit from Earth. Anything could have caused it—a simple accident, a stupid trick of fate. But Yance fixes it ably enough. Mariam stands off to the side and looks up at the stars while Valencia helps Yance align the camera to get the desired view across the face of the glacier. The ice flows too slowly for Mariam’s eyes too see, but the camera’s patience is infinite.

They climb back into the Pilgrim and set off. Mariam’s teeth rattle together with the motion. The teeth lining the Pilgrim’s treads dig into the ice beneath, grinding away with the forward movement. The treads cling to Pluto’s implacable face, lest a bad bounce send the rover and its cargo flying astray in the microgravity. Mariam focuses on the off-kilter rhythm of the Pilgrim beneath her, and not on the pervasive cold.

And not on Baily and Jef, their soft warm arms, the press of hot bodies in a bed only just big enough for the three of them. The too-small Orlando apartment that was never in all their time together too cold. Far too small a world to bring a child into, she thinks, then flinches away from that thought before it has a chance to burn. It takes four and a half hours for radio signals to travel all the way from Earth, but pain jolts along those billions of miles in half a second.

Unloading the equipment at the designated drill site on the plain relieves the ache in Mariam’s belly. Distracts her from it, at least. Mariam sucks water out of the straw inside her helmet once the drill is in place; her stomach refuses an attempt to suck down the apricot-flavored paste from the food tube. She checks the sun’s position before turning on the drill to take her first sample. Then the vibration of the drill, buzzing through the ice under Mariam’s feet and up into the hollow space under her ribcage, drums out the thoughts in her head.

The drill yields an ice core sample two meters long and eight centimeters in diameter. Old ice, laid deep. Mariam will figure out just how old it might be based on what kinds of deposits it contains, based on the secret folds and faults that lie hidden inside. A message from Pluto’s past, and a heavy one at that. It takes her, Valencia, and Yance all working together to maneuver it onto the back of the sledge. They take three more samples altogether. Mariam straightens her back after the last one is secured onto the Pilgrim, and scans the horizon.

The sun is gone.

Mariam’s knees tremble. She locks them in place and checks the display inside her helmet in case she missed a call from Char. Nothing.

Six days of Pluto’s slow-turning bulk with its back turned to home, to sunlight, to Jef and Baily. Six days of radio silence. Six days is forever, because in six days it will be too late to say goodbye.

Not the first thing Mariam has missed on the five-year-long mission, won’t be the last, but it will be the worst. Five years out and back: a lifetime. Not Mariam’s lifetime, not Jef’s or Baily’s. Annika’s lifetime.

Mariam follow Valencia and Yance up into the Pilgrim, checks that the samples are properly secured. Inside her helmet, tears carve lines down her face. They feel cold enough to freeze, but of course they won’t, and she can’t wipe them away. They evaporate slowly into the dry air in her helmet and leave salt tracks on her face as the Pilgrim shudders to life beneath her feet.

“Lieutenant,” says Valencia. His voice snaps across the radio in her helmet. “Buckle in.” Mariam complies.

“Maybe there’ll be a message waiting for you on the other side,” says Yance, over the open channel between the three of them. Mariam looks at the back of her helmet. That’s all she can see of Yance; the rest is hidden behind the driver’s seat. “I’m sure they’ll get something queued up for once we cutover again.”

Valencia tells Yance to focus on driving.

Mariam stares out at the twin beams streaming from the Pilgrim’s headlamps. She searches for answers, and when there are none to be had, she searches for questions. But there is nothing out there but the white gleam of light on the empty plains, punctuated by the odd long dark streak. Pluto’s bones.

The ride back to Sagacity is silent. Once the airlock cycles them through, Captain Valencia pulls off his helmet and waits for her to take off hers before he says, “I’m sorry, lieutenant. I know what she meant to you.” Does he? Mariam isn’t sure she does.

She puts away her spacesuit and retreats to her pod, where pictures flicker on the wall. Some are old, and some are newer, beamed along a radio wave to Mariam during her journey out into the universe. Here is her and Baily and Jef at city hall, signing the paperwork; Baily and Mariam have ribbons in their hair, and Jef’s only ornamentation is one of his rare smiles. Here is the party they threw when Mariam finished her PhD, all empty wine-boxes and streamers. And here is a newer picture, grainy from its flight across the solar system, of Baily’s big round belly and her big warm smile. And here is that baby, now an infant, now a toddler. Annika.

Annika is: two years old. Annika is: dark-haired like Mariam and tall like Jef and full of Baily’s smiles. Annika is: Mariam’s daughter, and she isn’t. Wasn’t. She’s Jef’s sperm, Baily’s womb, a host of chemicals and a small army of doctors. And of course Mariam’s egg, carefully collected and left behind in a lonely freezer.

But all that’s just the recipe, not the reality. To Annika, Jef and Baily are dad and mom. To Annika, Mariam is a crackle of sound, a glossy smile in the pictures taped to the apartment fridge.

And what is she to Jef and Baily now, frozen and far away?

They waited less than a year after Mariam left. Annika would have been four by the time she returned. Should have been. She couldn’t have turned down the trip, though. That would have meant kissing her career goodbye. Her work would not wait for her, but somehow she had thought her family could. Would hold still like a photograph, or the contents of a silent freezer. “Not much longer now,” was the last thing she’d heard from Baily. “A week, maybe less.” That was six days ago now, when Pluto had first rolled over to tentative daylight.

And now, six days of silence.

Was it Mariam who contributed the fatal flaw, or Jef? It shouldn’t matter, but of course it does. To Mariam, if not to the others. She could find the words to apologize for a crooked strand of DNA. The rest is so tangled, the threads of Jef and Baily and Annika’s lives twisted together and frozen in a core sample that goes all the way through Mariam. She doesn’t know what to say, and she needs someone else to say it first.

Why didn’t they call?

Mariam knows why. She knows that she’s a flickering candle in the incandescence of their grief. She knows that it’s wrong to resent the distance that she’s imposed, that she’s created. She resents it anyway.

The sky is dark through the little viewport in the curve of Mariam’s wall. Her fingers spread on the thick glass, cool despite the many layers of insulating gas between her and the vacuum outside. If she could have reached high enough to touch the sun before it faded—what then? From Pluto, the sun is scarcely a speck, but the Earth is missing entirely. And no one on that hot green-blue world can look up into the night sky and see Pluto’s frozen face, either.

Mariam reaches for her tablet, puts it on the desk in front of her. She wraps her arms around herself and closes her eyes. Words drag out of her slowly, chipped from the ice. Maybe the ice will melt one day, and maybe it won’t, but for now it’s enough to excavate what she needs. The words come out wrong, all wrong, but they come, and that’s all that matters. Mariam has six days to get them right.

This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library.

The mud on your legs covers you from knees to toes so I can’t quite tell where the soft leather of your boots meets your flesh until blood blooms from your ankles.

I offer you wine. You take a long sip and hand me back the glass as you unstrap your feet. Your hooves shine as you toss your humanity into a pile by the door.

You sniff the air. You take in the saffron, the lemon, the scorch of sage.

“Darling,” you say. “I thought I told you I was sick of fish?”

You did, but that was a year ago and I thought we’d come around to it again. My eyes linger on your slim patterns. They’re thin like a doe’s legs; one good crack with a cricket bat would bring you down.

[Full story after the cut.]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip Episode 60! This is your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to share this story with you. Today we have a GlitterShip original, “Unstrap Your Feet” by Emma Osborne and a poem, “The Librarian” by Rae White.

Both pieces are part of the new GlitterShip issue that is now available. The Spring 2018 issue of GlitterShip is available for purchase at glittership.com/buy and on Kindle, Nook, and Kobo. If you’re a Patreon supporter, you should have access to the new issue waiting for you when you log in. The new issue is only $2.99 and all of our back issues are now $1.49.

GlitterShip is also a part of the Audible Trial Program. This means that just by listening to GlitterShip, you are eligible for a free 30 day membership on Audible, and a free audiobook to keep.

If you’re looking for an excellent book with queer characters, Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts is an amazing listen. The story features a colony ship having power problems and some internal unrest. Our protagonist, Aster, is a brilliant scientist and doctor trapped in an extremely socially and racially segregated society. The book also deals with non-neurotypicality, intersex, and fluid/questioning gender identity. An Unkindness of Ghosts is part mystery, part colony ship drama, and part coming of age story (though it is not YA). Rivers has amazing prose, and the narration in this audio book sets it off wonderfully.

There are content warnings on this episode for a very, very sexy poem and descriptions of domestic emotional abuse in “Unstrap Your Feet.”

Rae White is a non-binary poet, writer, and zinester living in Brisbane. Their poetry collection Milk Teeth won the 2017 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and is published by the University of Queensland Press. Rae’s poem ‘what even r u?’ placed second in the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize. Rae’s poetry has been published in Meanjin Quarterly,Cordite Poetry Review, Overland, Rabbit, and others.

click is echo-church, like the ruckus I make at
funerals ∞ every movement casts my shadow: spells
spilling over bookshelves ∞ I’m not trapped, I have
a key ∞ but I stay curled in the wicker
chair ∞ waiting

for echo-click of ribs and what remains ∞ the flossed
fragments of my midnight ghost with her yawn-wide
kiss & skinless skull ∞ her cartilage grip & gasp & pelvic
bone clasped tight to my thigh ∞ her shiver-glitches, each
more grating & copper-tasting than the last ∞ her brittle
pushes as she groans ∞ against my knuckled hand ∞ I taste
soot & swordfish

later ∞ I press her
between folds of wildflower books & sing
timidly of the moon as she sleeps

Emma Osborne is a queer fiction writer and poet from Melbourne, Australia. Emma’s writing has appeared in Shock Totem, Apex Magazine, Queers Destroy Science Fiction, Pseudopod, the Review of Australian Fiction and the Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror, and has fiction forthcoming at Nightmare Magazine.

A proud member of Team Arsenic, Emma is a graduate of the 2016 Clarion West Writers Workshop. Emma is a former first reader at Clarkesworld Magazine, and current first reader at Arsenika.

Emma currently lives in Melbourne, drinking all of the coffee and eating all of the food, but has a giant crush on Seattle and turns up under the shadow of the mountain at every opportunity. You can find Emma on Twitter at @redscribe.

Unstrap Your Feet

by Emma Osborne

The mud on your legs covers you from knees to toes so I can’t quite tell where the soft leather of your boots meets your flesh until blood blooms from your ankles.

I offer you wine. You take a long sip and hand me back the glass as you unstrap your feet. Your hooves shine as you toss your humanity into a pile by the door.

You sniff the air. You take in the saffron, the lemon, the scorch of sage.

“Darling,” you say. “I thought I told you I was sick of fish?”

You did, but that was a year ago and I thought we’d come around to it again. My eyes linger on your slim patterns. They’re thin like a doe’s legs; one good crack with a cricket bat would bring you down.

You smell of honey and rosemary; honey for sweetness and rosemary for fidelity, remembrance and luck. I wonder how long it’ll take to re-make dinner.

Too long.

My fingers tangle in my pocket, deep down where you shouldn’t be able to see. Maybe I can talk you around. Your eyes sketch over my shoulder, my elbow. You can see the tension in my muscles, can map my posture and my heart rate and you know that my nails are digging into my palms nearly before I feel the skin split.

“We’ll order something,” I say, but it’s risky to have something delivered to the door when you’ve taken off your feet. Once, somebody saw, and then they didn’t ever see anything again. There’s still a stain in the laundry that I can’t scrub away.

You pause for a moment, just for the pulse of a few seconds, but it’s enough for my stomach to plunge and my mind to spin out infinite possibilities. The end of each thread is a broken finger or a pair of shattered wine glasses or just a cool, detached look that I’ll turn over and over in my head at night, knowing that despite our vows, sealed with blood and smoke and iron, you’ve decided that you’re going to have to kill me after all.

“Fine,” you say, “anything but pizza.”

These are the kinds of conversations that normal people have, every night, every month, with wrinkled brows and hunched shoulders and with a creased blazer hung up for another weary tomorrow.

You take your time in the shower while I call for dinner. With any luck you’ll stay there, or in the bedroom, until the delivery comes.

I’ve decided on BBQ from the place three streets away. They don’t ask questions if we order mostly meat, although I add a couple of sides—mac and cheese and some fries—for show. When the food arrives, I take care to open the door only a few inches, to take the bags and construct a “Thanks!” and to give a reassuring smile. I can hear you clattering around in the kitchen. I can nearly hear you scowling at the unwanted fish, scraped into a bowl for me to eat tomorrow.

I plate up dinner and you join me at the table with your canines glinting. I would have thought you’d have dull herbivore teeth, what with the hooves, but you have your father’s jawline, his bite. Sometimes I run my tongue over my own teeth, fearful that they’re sharpening and wondering what it would mean if they did. The food smells glorious, though I’m the only one who eats the sides. The mac and cheese is chewy and rich and creamy and I savor every bite after a diet so heavy in meat.

“Tell me about your day,” I say, nibbling on a forkful of pulled pork. I don’t care, not really, but it’s one of the only ways I can get news of the outside world on an ordinary, everyday level. The news is good for broad strokes, but I don’t get to hear about the lavender blooming in Mrs. Dancy’s yard or the color of the sky in midwinter dusk.

You’re in a good mood from the food so you appease me with small stories whilst you tear rich, fatty meat from a rib-bone. You’ve got a smear of sauce on your chin. The scent of hickory smoke has soaked into your skin. When I remember the days I had dared to drag my fingers through your hair, I tamp down a shudder and wonder if your budding horns rasp more like bones or fingernails.

Our wedding feast was nothing like this, but I suppose I’d always known you had secrets. Still, the feast was glorious and fine, a celebration for the ages. Oh, that night. We’d hoisted my mother’s crystal and downed the finest champagne after the ceremony under the oak tree.

My father was in charge of speeches and keeping cups full. Your mother roasted us a pair of swans. We ate them with silver forks and our fingers. There were charred potatoes and glass jars full of honey and red apples baked into pies. Bowls of cherries as bright as blood dotted the groaning tables and the air was heavy with the scent of roasted figs.

I hadn’t known then that your feet came off. I’d only known that your smile made my heart bloom like a blushing rose and that your kisses tasted of jasmine.

Your father was in charge of the music, and soon enough everyone was spinning, dancing, stamping to his wild fiddle, all red-faced and heaving, their legs shaking as they gasped for breath.

I was happy that night. Sometimes I think I can still smell it, as if happiness is a hint of perfume saved in a handkerchief that I’ve tucked into the pocket of an old coat.

You’re finished with your food so I load the dishwasher. I used to like washing the dishes by hand and carefully wiping them clean with my favorite faded red dishtowel, but we both agreed that the dishwasher is better for the environment.

It’s curious, the things you care about.

I try not to make any unnecessary noise as we wind down the hours before bed. Sometimes I can get away with reading on the couch for a few hours. If I’m almost entirely still, your eyes skip over me when you’re restlessly roaming the house, your hooves clacking on the floorboards.

I tried to get out once.

I still have the scars on my ribs from your teeth.

I try not to care what you are doing, but tonight in the basement it involves knives and the squeal of metal on metal. I can’t help but look up when you walk past the lounge room, your muscled arms popping with excited veins, your face flushed, your hair a mess.

Our eyes meet. I’m usually more careful than that, and look away, but this time I smile in my panic.

You smile back, delighted.

All I can see is your teeth.

I used to be so much bigger, so much more. I had dreams and loves and fancies; my heart was spun sugar and grace. That me is dead now, my delicate heart crushed. You have eroded me like a hard rain erodes a mountain: bit by bit; thousands of tiny strikes.

You’re cooking something in the kitchen that smells like apples and roasted flesh. It’s rare enough for you to do so, and anxiety tightens my chest as I wonder what it means. I try to tune it out, to hold my breath, but the house is full of the smell.

When you finally call me to bed, I slide a marker into my book. The pages are sharp on my fingertips.

“Goodnight, darling,” you breathe into my ear after you’ve kissed me.

“Goodnight,” I say, my eyes squeezed shut in the dark.

You know the catch of my breath when it hitches; you know the sound of my tears as they track down my cheeks. I’ve learned to lie flat and still under the smoke-gray blankets, to move only when necessary, to not roll. When I was young, I’d sleep carelessly, roaming about the bed like a slumbering explorer, one leg out at an angle and with an open palm up to the sky. These days it’s all straight lines and aching bones from a lack of shift.

Most nights, I don’t sleep. Not until you’ve gotten up and strapped your feet back on and gone into the world. When the sun peeps through the curtains and I’m sure you’ve gotten clear of the house I collapse onto the couch, tuck a blanket around me. The bed reminds me of nothing but cold misery.

Soon you’ll be home again, and we’ll feast again, smile carefully at each other over bone-white plates and French cutlery with scarlet handles.

I spend the rest of the day cleaning with vinegar and lemons. I square your sharpened tools away, grant symmetry to the house. I listen to news radio as I tidy, desperate for the sound of another human voice.

Sometimes I write on scraps of paper, on anything that will take my mark. I write about me and you, and I am sure that it reads like a fairy tale, or a biblical nightmare, or perhaps something stitched together from their forgotten parts. I can’t risk you finding my words. When I have covered every scrap of surface with truths I place the paper on my tongue, pulp it with my dull human teeth, and devour us.

I check my body over in the shower when I make it under the hot water in the sun-bright afternoon. My scars are days old, weeks old, a hundred years old. There’s nothing poking through my scalp yet, and my feet are just feet. You are the one who changed.

This evening when you come home you’re carrying something in a leather satchel that smells of blood and beeswax. You hold my eye with a wild smile as you snap it open.

Inside is a new pair of feet.

I know them because they’re my feet, right down to the cracked heels and the crooked little toes.

“These are for you,” you say, measuring my calves with your eyes and squinting at my shoes. “Now that you’re ready.”

Your eyes are sharp, loving, sparking like struck flint.

What did I do to make you think that this is what I wanted? My face twists into a grimace that you mistake for a smile.

I take the feet.

You grin like the sun coming up and slip past me into the kitchen. I merely stand, horrified but absently holding the feet that I could use to walk outside.

When you return, you’re holding a small plate heavy with warmed-up dark meat and pale apple flesh.

“Baked apples, lungs, and liver, with plenty of butter,” you say. The fruit of temptation. Organs of the breath and soul. Milk and meat.

So that’s what you were cooking.

I know my legends well enough to know that eating from this plate will change me forever. I gently place my new feet near the door next to yours and take up the silver fork.

“Let me,” you say. The last time I saw your face this bright was under the light of a thousand fireflies on our wedding day.

Refusing you has always been an impossibility.

You ease a slice of liver into my mouth. As I chew I feel my calves split like an inseam. I thought it would hurt when my old feet slid off, but you kneel before me and tug my ankles and look, they’re free and loose and bloody. It smells like a slaughterhouse in here. Blood and sharpness.

You must hold me upright as I kick out of my old feet. My new hooves haven’t hardened yet; they’re still feathery and glistening from their birth. There’s bile in my throat and I can only hope you put my wild pulse down to excitement.

You ease me onto the couch with your strong arms and kiss my forehead. I’m panicking, but I hold myself as still as I can. What have I become? What will I become?

I am nauseous but suddenly terribly hungry, for meat and flowers and fresh air. I scuff my hooves on the floor. You trace the rubbery feathers with a loving fingertip. In an hour, maybe two, my hooves will be firm and ready to encase in their disguise of flesh, and the two of us will leave the house, together.

“Darling,” you say, “What do you feel like eating?” You clasp my fingers, too tight.

“Whatever you want,” I whisper, trying desperately to keep my voice steady. You look so happy.

I’ve gotten everything wrong, everything. Yes, I will walk outside, and yes I will lift a neighbor’s rose to my eager inhale, but you will be there beside me every single second.

I laugh, unable to contain my tears.

Now it’s the whole world.

The whole world is my cage.

We go.

END

“The Librarian” is copyright Rae White 2018.

“Unstrap Your Feet” is copyright Emma Osborne 2018.

This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library.

The fighting spider sat heavily in Kian Boon’s left palm, where he’d knocked it from its leafy abode. It was maybe a centimeter and a half from the tip of its pedipalps to the silky spinnerets of its abdomen, black and silver like one of the sleek Chinese centipedals that increasingly frequented the roads below his building. He could feel the weight of the thing as he cupped his hand around it and it jumped, smacking against the roof of his fingers.

Oh hi, Rey. Hi. What are you doing? Oh, are you coming over here to smell. I know, Rey. I know. You’re a good dog. But, I gotta do this recording. Yeah.

[Intro music plays]

Hello, welcome to GlitterShip Episode 59 for August 27th, 2018. This is your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to be sharing this story with you. Today, we have a GlitterShip original, “Never Alone, Never Unarmed” by Bobby Sun, and a poem, “Feminine Endlings” by Alison Rumfitt.

Before we get started, I want to let you know that GlitterShip is part of of the Audible Trial Program. This means that just by listening to GlitterShip, you are eligible for a free 30 day membership on Audible, and a free audiobook to keep. One book that I listened to recently is They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera. I will warn you, this young adult book is full of feelings. That said, I thought it was a great example of queer tragedy rather than tragic queers. In a near future world, everyone gets a phone call between midnight and 3am of the day that they’re going to die. They Both Die at the End follows two teen boys who got that call on the same day. I loved how tender the book was, but here’s your warning: have tissues on hand.

To download a free audiobook today, go to www.audibletrial.com/glittership and choose an excellent book to listen to. Whether that’s They Both Die at the End or maybe even something that’s a little less emotionally strenuous.

Alison Rumfitt is a transgender writer who studies in Brighton, UK. She loves, amongst other things: forest, folklore, gothic romance, and wild theories about her favorite authors being trans. Her poetry has previously been published in Liminality, Strange Horizons, and Eternal Haunted Summer. Two of her poems were nominated for the Rhysling award in 2018. You can find her on Twitter @gothicgarfield.

Feminine Endlings

by Alison Rumfitt

I’m the last one with a mouth I think the last one
who still has a tongue that can dance the last
to dance or move the last to use her lungs like
lungs were used like they used to be like
a soft ball of feathers being blown by a gale
I am the full stop I think the forest is different for me
now, I can’t see the others, and I cannot think of them,
all the trees have changed shape
they now carry new sub-meanings
deep in their bark new grubs are born
screaming from pods
to chew at my place
this city
which I knew so well
which I knew automatically could navigate as an automaton
turning left and right the moment I sensed it
it’s gone, somewhere, when I had my back turned
drinking away in a clearing
now the people have different colored eyes
it’s far less bursting and different than my old days tell me
the sun left along with
all of the people I was in love with the city the forest
the cave-system the desert the habitat adapts to the
things that dwell in it the things inside it
evolve to be more like their future selves
and I hate the way it makes me feel
because I like knowing where I am—

the last Tasmanian Tiger died in a zoo from neglect
as a storm ripped at her cage she lay in the corner
head tucked under her arm the last
Stephens Island wren was clawed to death
by the first cat she fell to the grass feeling the
teeth around her shallow head
the last Passenger Pigeon was stuffed
she sits in a glass box
telling everyone who visits that everything will change
and you will die eventually
and nothing really matters if you don’t want it to
and there’s so many of us
who died somewhere alone the last of a kind
without a name or a grave-marker or ashes
to be put upon a fireplace or mantel
and I hate that I could end up the same
forgotten under piles of new babies with new ways
of thinking new streets built over my house
as a lightning strike burns down the tree I hid in
the end of a line marks the place where you know what the lineis the end of a species or a group or a life marks the
definition of said species or group or life
so the end of me matters and the end of me
will live on past the rest of me so if I end
the same way all the others do I become
the same as all the others I am not
me I am them but I am me if I end never
or if I end when it becomes thematically
meaningful which is why nothing matters now
but then it will it will really matter everything will matter
the last trans woman on earth
standing on a pile of trans women
the only thing that tells you she is ‘she’ is
she rhymes unstressed which is arbitrary
maybe we won then if the last woman is her
if the last trans woman in a new world
where everyone is nothing
she is this wonderful
thing happy in a house built
on the dead made of the dead maybe eating the dead
on her own making her own fun reading
coding tattooing herself with notes and appendixes
if it’s her then perhaps the perfect final note of Us is—

This, old Death slowly walking opening the door to meet her
and he nods and she nods and the world becomes a little darker.

Bobby Sun is a Chinese-Malaysian author and spoken-word poet who grew up in Singapore and is studying in London. His work has previously been published on Tor.com as well as in the inaugural Singapore Poetry Writing Month (“SingPoWriMo”) anthology (as Robert Bivouac), and in Rosarium Publishing’s anthology of Southeast Asian steampunk, The SEA is Ours: Tales from Steampunk Southeast Asia as Robert Liow.

Never Alone, Never Unarmed

by Bobby Sun

The fighting spider sat heavily in Kian Boon’s left palm, where he’d knocked it from its leafy abode. It was maybe a centimeter and a half from the tip of its pedipalps to the silky spinnerets of its abdomen, black and silver like one of the sleek Chinese centipedals that increasingly frequented the roads below his building. He could feel the weight of the thing as he cupped his hand around it and it jumped, smacking against the roof of his fingers.

He kept his left hand closed and extracted a jar from a raggedy, home-made satchel. The jar was double-layered; between the inner and outer layers of chitinous plastic shrilk was water, kept reasonably below the ambient temperature with a simple synthorg heat sink he’d Shaped himself. The spring-sealed jar flicked open as Kian Boon visualized and nudged a couple of its Shape-threads. He dropped the spider in, snapped the jar shut and let the cooling take effect. This little thing, all of approximately two grams, was worth about a dollar; iced Coklat for two at the kopitiam near his school. The jar, of course, wasn’t part of the deal. His buyers would need a container of their own.

Kian Boon swatted at a mosquito, then pushed his way deeper into the vegetation. He winced as a twig scratched his cheek. There were still four jars left to fill, though, and it was only nine on a Saturday morning.

The air was thick with mist, and the leaves still hung with dew. White-headed birds hopped through the trees, leaping from branch to branch and snatching red berries off their stems. Somewhere above him a male koel sounded off. The sun filtered through the canopy, dappling the ground in pixel-patterns; Kian Boon made a game of dancing through them. This area was new to him. He’d heard of it only because Aidil, a rival spider-hunter from the neighbouring class, had let it slip to his sister. She’d told her best friend, and it had eventually ended up with Ravi Pillai (who’d, naturally, told Kian Boon).

Ravi was the bright-eyed Indian boy in his class he’d noticed during orientation, on their first day of Form One. He’d been assigned to Kian Boon’s group, and was the very first to get picked for “Whacko”. Kian Boon hadn’t recalled his classmates’ names in time, so Ravi had hit him hard enough with the rolled-up newspaper that he’d sustained a paper cut on his forehead. The horrified facilitator had excluded Ravi from the rest of that game, though Kian Boon hadn’t really minded. The only name Ravi really remembered at the end of that day was his.

It was, well, best friends at first sight. They hung out at recess almost every day, sometimes joined in a game of soccer and occasionally went to the kopitiam or spider-fighting rings after school with their friends. Not alone, though, he thought. Not yet. He’d get there later. There was a plan, and he needed the spiders for it.

Kian Boon exhaled. He picked through the thickest bush he could find, searching for the tell-tale bivouac of a fighting spider. They preferred the densest vegetation, making their home in glued-together leaves. Finding a nest, he gently unzipped it, dissolving the silk into its constituent proteins. The spider hung onto the upper leaf, but with a quick motion of the wrist it was resting in his cupped left palm. He felt its silken trail as it darted about, and he closed his hands to gauge its weight.

A good spider, if a little sluggish. It was well-fed. He peeked through a gap in his fingers. Its silver-banded abdomen iridesced a bottle-green; a rare and valuable variety. Kian Boon slipped it into another jar, watching as the critter paced, then slowed, then eventually fell asleep.

There was a swift rustling. Kian Boon turned around and there, maybe ten meters away from him, was a tiger about three meters in length. Perhaps he could make it turn away? He pulled its Shape-threads up, but they were greyed-out; it was too strong for him to Shape. Kian Boon hissed in frustration. He backed further into the vegetation, praying he hadn’t been spotted.

He hadn’t expected a tiger. Singaporean tigers were rare. The British had set bounties on each head for the century they’d colonized the island, and their subjects had been happy to deliver. The Great War, just under a decade ago, had taken its toll on them too; fierce fighting between the British Malayan Army and the Nanyang Republic’s coalition had driven them across the Straits, setting large tracts of its old growth ablaze. This place, though, had been almost completely untouched. Some of the trees were massive, and looked decades, if not centuries, old.

Of course there’d be tigers here.

What had his mother told him about tigers? They were fast, strong and intelligent. They could climb trees, and there was no point playing dead.

Think, Kian Boon thought to himself. You are never alone, and never unarmed. He’d heard the Combat Shaper Corps’ motto on the thinscreen dozens of times in recruitment advertisements, and his parents had served with them in the war. Anything alive, or once alive, could be useful. Think.

Dead leaves on the ground. Live leaves everywhere else. Wood, if he could tear it away. Several blade-like mushrooms sprouting from a lightning-blackened stump. Bugs of all kinds; swarming midges in the air, nests of kerengga ants streaming down the taller trees, large crickets, caterpillars and butterflies.

Think.

The tiger snuffled. It knew Kian Boon was there, but didn’t want to advance just yet. It would wait for the boy to let his guard down and then strike. Kian Boon could see it pacing, its stripes slipping through gaps in the vegetation. He kept it in front of him. His gaze leapt from tree to tree as he wracked his brain for solutions; his guard was up, and multi-coloured Shape-threads popped in and out of his vision. He blinked sweat out of his eyes, though it was a relatively cool morning, and then he attacked.

Kian Boon realigned the threads near the bottom of two of the nearest trees with a slash of his fingers, loosening their cells, and thrust his hand forward, dislodging them. The trees splintered at the breaks, but didn’t fall; he only wanted to scare the tiger, not hurt it. The tiger leapt back, wary, then stepped around the obstruction. Kian Boon locked eyes with it, just a leap away from him. The sun turned it a dappled gold, its stripes shifting as it padded towards him. It licked its muzzle. Trembling, Kian Boon reached into his satchel for his pocketknife, but instead felt one of his empty spider jars. He pulled back, then looked again.

The synthorg heat sink was a simple construct. Kian Boon could put one together in an hour from kitchen scraps. Powered by a small reservoir of ethanol, it dispersed heat from the water insulating the jar into the external environment, keeping the inside cool. Kian Boon snapped the empty jar open, snatched up a handful of dead leaves and stuffed them in. He Shaped them into a slurry, then sealed the jar. He tore at its Shape-threads roughly, until the outer layer cracked and the water drained out. The heat sink began to glow, and Kian Boon hurled the jar as hard as he could at the tiger’s face. It smashed, the slurry spilled out, and the red-hot heat sink set it ablaze. It was merely a fistful of fire, but the tiger roared and swiped at its face, singed by the improvised weapon.

Kian Boon made a run for it. He sprinted past the temporarily blinded creature, no longer caring to dance through the sunlight. He burst through shrubs, trod on ant trails, snapped every twig in his path as he rushed to the safety of the small capillary road he’d entered by. The spiders he’d caught slept on.

The Transit Authority centibus stop was deserted. The factory beside it had closed for the weekend, and only three buses served this stop. Kian Boon flipped through his bus guide and figured out a route. It would cost him a flat ten cents, out of his weekly state school allowance of seven dollars and fifty cents. He sat on one of the fan-shaped seats, which had been painted a bright shade of orange, and kicked the gravelled ground absent-mindedly.

It finally hit him. That was the first tiger he’d seen in the flesh. The captive ones in the Zoo, behind panes of mesh and hardened shrilk, didn’t count. He recalled its eyes, staring into his as he’d reached in panic for his pocket knife, for all the good that would’ve done. The smell of the tiger’s burning fur, acrid like the time he’d accidentally let his hair catch on his elder cousin’s sparkler two New Years ago. He’d panicked and run headlong into her, putting out the fire but also burning a hole in her pretty red qipao. She’d been able to fix the damage, but the fabric had been stretched thin and eventually fell apart in the wash.

He looked into his satchel again. Four remaining jars, half of them empty. He slapped the seat in frustration. The trees could have been knocked down, instead of snapped. He’d been too soft to risk hurting a fucking tiger that was about to eat him alive. He could’ve used the insects to his advantage, sending ants and flies to blind the predator while he fled. He could’ve crumbled the humus beneath his enemy’s feet, trapping it in place, but no. He’d overloaded the fuel cell on the heat sink, instead, because he’d had it in his hand and stopped thinking.

He sighed. Getting the materials for another jar hadn’t been in the plan, and it would set him back a couple of weeks in savings. The state school allowance was alright, but it was hard to save much of it when the Ministry-mandated lunch service deducted a dollar each weekday. That left him with two-fifty a week, of which one dollar went to transport to and from school. Most kids ran errands for extra money or joined a semi-legal enterprise, like the spider-fighting rings. Some, like the ahbengs and ahlians at school, joined up with the secret societies that the Nanyang administration hadn’t managed to stamp out. He mostly stayed away from those, though he did sell spiders and tech to the few he trusted. Ravi didn’t like them at all, but it was business. Perhaps he’d scavenge something, repair some junk, and maybe that’d pay for a few more dates at the kopitiam. The plan would go on; he only had enough for a first date, now, but Ravi would probably forgive iced Coklat.

Kian Boon leaned back, staring at the ceiling of the bus stop. A nest of communal spiders had made their webs between two of the scaffolds. The dense, grey mesh surrounded the lone tube light, a fatal attraction for moths; he presumed this stop was so out of the way that the Transit Authority’s street cleaners didn’t come here. He focused on their Shape-threads and sliced a bit of the web off with a pinch of his fingers. Several spiders emerged, startled. He let go, and they drifted lazily until a gust of wind sent them, and the chunk of web they clung to, into the distance. He knew this species; that bit he’d just cut off would eventually establish its own colony somewhere else, if it found a safe home. The rest of the web would adjust, rebuilding what he’d torn off.

He wondered if it would be the same for him, if he pinched a little bit off himself and someone else let it go.

Would it grow back?

His centibus arrived. The thumping undulations of its rubberised legs slowed as it pulled up to the stop. Kian Boon shrugged his satchel on, hoisted himself off the orange seat and climbed aboard.

Kian Boon reached home at eleven, just as his Ma began preparing lunch. She was washing rice while little Siew Gim, all of sixteen months old, played with their Ba in the living room. Ma scowled at him through the kitchen doorway; he shouted, “sorry, Ma,” and hurried to his room.

He looked at himself, covered in scratches and forest grime, and sighed. If Ma had started to cook, she’d have washed up beforehand. The water would be cold for a while before the solar heater managed to warm it up. He exhaled and slumped to the cold, green-grey floor, letting the heat drain out of him.

Rolling onto his stomach, he crawled over to his satchel and removed the spiders he’d caught. They slumbered peacefully in their jars, legs tucked beneath their bellies. He looked into their tiny black eyes, open but unaware, and the streaks upon their shiny bodies. He picked himself up and set them down on his homework-cluttered desk. His cheek stung; the cut he’d sustained had reopened, slightly, and blood began to well in the laceration. Kian Boon sighed, brushed his hair back and opened the door.

Siew Gim was waiting for him, babbling “Gor-gor” excitedly in Ba’s arms. She’d been born with nubby stumps instead of legs. Ba’s transport had been hit by a fungal mine the Brits had left behind during their final retreat. He’d been evacuated back to Pontianak and put out of action for the rest of the war. Kian Boon recalled sitting by Ba’s bed in the base hospital while the doctors purged the disease from his father’s body. They hadn’t discovered the mutations until they’d had Siew Gim.

Kian Boon reached for his little sister, but Ba pulled her back at the last moment, laughing. Siew Gim squealed and shook her head to get her fringe out of her face. She pouted at Ba, and he rubbed her nose with his finger. He gently chided Kian Boon in Hokkien.

“Boon, go shower, then can play with Gim. Water warm already.”

Kian Boon nodded and headed for the master bedroom, where their shared bathroom was. He stripped his dirt-covered clothes off and shook them to make sure nothing had come back home with him. He spotted and ripped the legs off a biting bug that had attached itself to his collar; his spiders would need the food, but he couldn’t afford to have the thing loose in the house. Thankfully, nothing else had hitched a ride out of the forest. He stepped into the bathroom and hit the showers, relaxing as the sun-warmed water rolled over his body.

The smell of fried fish filled the house as Kian Boon sat on the living room floor. Siew Gim bounced on his lap, giggling as she tried to headbutt him on the chin. He threw her favourite toy, a synthorg turtle plushie named “Turtle”, across the room, where it landed on its back and started to scrabble in the air. Siew Gim took off after it, crawling on her rubberized elbow and wrist pads. Kian Boon watched her; she wiggled her butt and stumps in sync with the movements of her arms. It looked as if she was swimming on the ground, almost effortlessly; they’d put her in a pool once, and she’d taken off like a fish.

He wondered, not for the first time, what he’d looked like at that age.

Ma and Ba hadn’t seen Kian Boon often. Ma had fallen pregnant just before the war, given birth and been called back to duty once he’d turned three months old, leaving him in a military childcare facility on the outskirts of Pontianak. Ma was a combat-Shaping instructor, and Ba was a maintenance specialist with a mechanized infantry company; they’d been assigned to separate units as a result. Kian Boon had one official picture of himself for each of the four years he’d been a ward of the state. Still, he knew he’d had it good. At least they were alive, and they treated him well.

Ba sat at the workbench in the living room, tinkering with one of his latest creations. Ba had service injury compensation in addition to the social dividend which the Nanyang government had implemented several years ago. It was more than enough to live on, but he insisted on working full-time with the Reconstruction Trust. He maintained residential buildings with his team, and built things in his spare time.

Ba was currently working on a lifelike in the shape of a pigeon. There were scraps of gore wedged under his fingernails as he carved up a pig brain with a scalpel and threaded the grey matter into the pigeonlike’s soft, shrilk body, weaving neural circuits that would link his creation’s brain to the rest of its body and allow it to move and respond to stimuli once he’d given it a circulatory system, sensory organs and muscles. A pile of animal hair and feathers, bought from the local butcher, remained by the side of the table as raw material for its feathers and beak.

Kian Boon picked Siew Gim up and walked over. She loved to see her father working on things, even though she was years away from getting her Shaping, and often crudely mimicked his hand movements as he flicked at threads, waving her hands as if to help him in his work. Upon seeing the greyish pig brain she squealed with delight, babbling “hooi, foo!” when she recognized the colour. Ba smiled at her, then motioned to Kian Boon.

“Boon, put Gim down. Come sit here.” Kian Boon lowered Siew Gim to the floor. She scooted off to the middle of the living room to play with Turtle. He sat down next to Ba, as Ba resumed weaving the pigeonlike’s neural circuits. The fingers of Ba’s right hand traced the grooves he’d etched into its body, pulling the grey matter along with it. Kian Boon watched as he guided them along their paths. He studied the threads, observing how Ba shifted the different, intersecting colours as he bound the circuits to their shrilk housing. Ba hummed a tune while he worked. It was an old marching song based on the Chinese classic, “Man Jiang Hong”. He’d taught Kian Boon that song on one of their weekend outings earlier that year, while they searched the hills of Bukit Timah for rare wildlife. Kian Boon had thought the guy who’d played the Chinese hero Yue Fei on thinscreen a couple of years back had looked good, and Ba had teased him about his “heroic boyfriend” all the way home. Ma had laughed when Kian Boon complained, and told him not to let other boys distract him from his schoolwork.

Ba tapped Kian Boon on the hand with a gory finger.

“Boon, can see the threads on the grey matter?”

“Can see, Ba, can see.”

“Good. You try to move them a bit. Fill in the gap.”

Ba passed the grey matter to Kian Boon. Kian Boon summoned and seized hold of just one strand, manipulating it with his index finger. He could see the etching, and he let the material stretch and fill it up. Where it branched, he picked a path and continued on it, only returning to the original when it ended. He traced the circuits of the pigeonlike precisely, looking back to Ba every now and then for approval. Ba simply nodded and smiled at his son. Kian Boon, for his part, was happy to be working on one of Ba’s projects.

“Ba, this one use for what?”

“This one for singing. See the circuits at the neck, there? For vocal chords.”

“Go market show?”

“Yeah. Let neighbour they all see.”

This was to be a showbird, the kind old folks hung up in cages and let sing to each other in the mornings. On the days the family went out for breakfast, Kian Boon would often sit in the market’s sheltered concourse with Siew Gim, listening to their melodious tweeting. Each showbird was controlled by a single brain, Shaped into accepting musical instructions; the quality of the song then depended on how the Shaper constructed its inner workings.

He wondered if Ravi would like the showbirds. There were orioles living in their school. Their feathers were a brilliant yellow, and their eyes and wings were ringed in black. He’d pointed one out to Ravi, who’d immediately picked a brilliant feather off to use as a bookmark. Ravi loved their calls, which reminded him of mornings, waking up and walking to school in the cool half-light. The sweet, clear chirps even evoked the smell, he’d said, of damp leaves and dewy air.

Kian Boon had asked him then, “I smell like what?”

Ravi had thought for a bit before shrugging. “School, I guess. Just like school.”

Ba gently tapped Kian Boon’s hand.

Kian Boon’s finger had gone off course. Grey matter had now forced itself into a crevice it had no right to be in, awkwardly bulging the shrilk surface of a wing. Kian Boon grimaced. It was a minor accident, but if not corrected, it would affect the pigeonlike’s function. Ba was still smiling, though.

“Can fix one, Boon. Don’t worry. Just think.”

Kian Boon focused. He pulled the grey matter back, slowly; it grudgingly slid back out of the crevice, leaving a crack behind. He summoned the Shape-threads around the crack and the bulge on the pigeonlike’s wing and obligingly, they rose. A firm prodding applied directly to the bulge shifted the material inwards, and a pinch closed the crack entirely. He gave the thing a once-over. It looked fine now, like it had before, and he breathed a sigh of relief. Ba patted him on the shoulder and took the unfinished pigeonlike from him.

The sound of plates caused them to turn their heads. Ma was setting the table for lunch, with fried fish, a pot of rice and some bok choy. Ba and Kian Boon got up, then headed to the toilet to wash their hands.

It was four in the afternoon, and Kian Boon lay on his bed. A completed sheaf of Math worksheets lay on his desk. Kian Boon was more interested in science and Shaping than totting up numbers and letters, and often found himself asking Ravi for help with the tougher questions. The other boy had a knack for logic and rhetoric and dreamt of being an architect. His mother had been one before the war, he’d told Kian Boon, and now worked in the Reconstruction Trust as a restoration engineer, supervising the restoration of historic buildings. Kian Boon had asked Ba if he knew her, but Ba didn’t know much about her except that she had her own team and a reputation for efficiency.

As he turned the cordless phone over in his hands, Kian Boon wondered what meeting Ms Pillai would be like. It would have to happen someday, he reasoned. She sometimes picked up when he called Ravi over the weekend, and her voice had a sunny warmth that Ravi had inherited. He turned the dial three times, and then stopped.

This was part of the plan, he reminded himself. He’d prepared something for this, folded it up in an old exercise book and kept it away just for this moment. It was a love letter, at first, until he realized he couldn’t do it in person; it then became a script, memorized over the past week so he wouldn’t sound like he was reading off it. He’d thoroughly grilled Ravi on his plans for the weekend. Ravi had said he’d be back from soccer practice and lunch at three, and Kian Boon had done his homework in double-time so he’d be free to call at four. This was all part of the plan.

He redialled the eight digits of Ravi’s phone number, forcing himself to drag his finger clockwise. He could already feel the resistance building up. His heart rate rose each time he released the dial, and the muscles in his neck and jaw tensed up. He exhaled slowly as the dial returned to its original position for the eighth time, and somewhere in Singapore, a phone began to ring.

On the fourth ring, Ravi picked up. Kian Boon’s mouth went dry at the lilt of his voice. Everything seemed to snap into focus, and Shape-threads began to encroach on his vision. He forced them away, breathing deeply. He struggled to get the words out.

“Hi, Ravi, Kian Boon here. You free?”

“Yeah, what’s up?”

“Uh, I actually been thinking. You know we been friends for a while now, right? We, uh, got to know each other quite well over the past few months. We become kind of close.”

“Yeah, got that. What’s this about?”

Think.

“Um, actually, I want ask you something. You’re, uh, not like other guys. Like, more mature, more smart, more handsome. Uh. Um. Uh. You want to go out? With me. Like. Date.”

Ravi was quiet for a while. Kian Boon could hear him breathing through clenched teeth, the slightly wet sound of air coming up against wet enamel, before he finally said something.

“Boon, you’re a good friend, but that’s it. I’m really flattered, but I don’t think I like you like that.”

Kian Boon felt his stomach giving way and a pressure in his nose. He lowered the phone, so if he began to cry Ravi wouldn’t hear it. The Shape-threads returned, and this time he couldn’t force them down. He wanted to scream at Ravi, hang up on the insensitive, undeserving boy, but he stopped himself.

Think.

There were other people out there. Plus, Ravi hadn’t sounded weird, or creeped out. It wasn’t like this was the end.

Can fix one. Don’t worry, Boon. Just think.

Kian Boon exhaled through his nose and brought the phone back up.

“Hey Ravi, you there or not?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“It’s alright. I, uh, don’t mind. Heh. You still want hang out, though? Like, not in that way. Friend friend only. I got two good spiders today, we can get iced Coklat after school tomorrow.”

Ravi laughed and said, “Yeah, sure.”

The pressure dissipated. Kian Boon sighed, smiled, and responded.

“Alright, set.”

He chuckled.

“Eh, Ravi, by the way. You seen a tiger before?”

END

“Feminine Endlings” is copyright Alison Rumfitt 2018.

“Never Alone, Never Unarmed” is copyright Bobby Sun 2018.

This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library.

You can support GlitterShip by checking out our Patreon at patreon.com/keffy, subscribing to our feed, or by leaving reviews on iTunes.

Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back soon with another GlitterShip original.

When you breathe deeply, really push the air from your lungs and let the cold valley wind fill you again, you can smell the city’s ghosts. They smell like burning. Not like fire but like everything that comes with it: smoke, scorched hair, wet carbon, ash. This is a city that burns spasmodically, a city of gas lines and rail cars, coal dust and arson, a city with wooden roofs and narrow alleys. A city that is always shivering.

Forty or fifty years ago, this apartment building was the hotel where Senators kept their mistresses and boy-toys, all blue velvet and gilt. Then a fire gutted it.

[Full transcript after the cut.]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 58 for August 25, 2018. This is your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to be sharing this story with you.

Our episode today is a reprint “In the City of Kites and Crows” by Megan Arkenberg, read by A.J. Fitzwater.

Megan Arkenberg’s work has appeared in over fifty magazines and anthologies, including Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Shimmer, and Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year. She has edited the fantasy e-zine Mirror Dance since 2008 and was recently the nonfiction editor for Queers Destroy Horror!, a special issue of Nightmare Magazine. She currently lives in Northern California, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in English literature. Visit her online at http://www.meganarkenberg.com.

A.J. Fitzwater is a dragon wearing a human meat suit from Christchurch, New Zealand. A graduate of Clarion 2014, she’s had stories published in Shimmer Magazine, Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, and in Paper Road Press’s At The Edge anthology. She also has stories coming soon at Kaleidotrope and PodCastle. As a narrator, her voice has been heard across the Escape Artists Network, on Redstone SF, and Interzone. She tweets under her penname as @AJFitzwater

Content warning for descriptions of police violence and suicide.

In the City of Kites and Crows

By Megan Arkenberg

1.

When you breathe deeply, really push the air from your lungs and let the cold valley wind fill you again, you can smell the city’s ghosts. They smell like burning. Not like fire but like everything that comes with it: smoke, scorched hair, wet carbon, ash. This is a city that burns spasmodically, a city of gas lines and rail cars, coal dust and arson, a city with wooden roofs and narrow alleys. A city that is always shivering.

Forty or fifty years ago, this apartment building was the hotel where Senators kept their mistresses and boy-toys, all blue velvet and gilt. Then a fire gutted it.

I tell this to Lisse, and she rubs at the burn scar on the back of her knee, at the tattoo that crawls up her thigh in a hatch of green and golden lines, like a map of a city, or a circuit board in fragments. Lisse just got out of Federal prison for smashing the rearview mirrors off a police car. She has new scars now, the white tracks of some riot officer’s baton, one of which slices across her left nipple and makes her breast look punctured, deflated. She sits in her flannel bathrobe at the table in her living room, in the apartment that was a hotel room and still smells like the arsonist’s match, and she shakes her head with a slow, sad smile. “Hythloday,” she says, as though my name were a dirge. “How can you, of all people, believe in ghosts?”

Outside the bay window behind her, three stories below us, a crush of posterboard and sweatshirted bodies is churning and chanting its way up 9th street, towards the West Gate of the Senate. Lisse snaps photos on her phone. She edits an antigovernment webzine, contributes information to two antisenatorial projects that I know of—both documenting police brutality and violations of prisoners’ rights—and surely several others that I don’t. Her thick hair is unoiled and still damp from the shower, smelling of grass and wood dust, smelling of her.

“Everyone I’m fucking is trying to overthrow the government,” I tell her. I’m spread out on her couch like the jammy sediment in the bottom of a wine glass, and I know that this observation, this trenchant précis of the last thirty-six months, is the closest that I will ever come to political analysis. Or to self-reflection. Lisse, who will not let me back into her bed until I’m sober, who still fucks me on the couch, does not look up from the photos of the protestors on her phone.

“Well, Hythloday,” she says, half word and half sigh. “Why do you think that is?”

2.

Some evenings, when I’m sober enough to pull on a pair of trousers and an old suit coat, tie my hair back and wash the traces of eyeliner from my cheeks, I take the train down to the university. It’s quiet and damp so close to the river, the trees whispering to themselves in the fog, and all the public spaces roped off with yellow lines of caution tape. If anyone were to ask me what I’m doing here tonight—anyone except for Lisse, who won’t ask me, who never asks—I’d say I came for the lecture on the Mnemosyne project, an answer both innocuous and vaguely suspect. Really, I’m here to see Jesse.

They check IDs at the door of the auditorium. I don’t know if “they” are the Mnemosyne developers looking for allies or a Senatorial commission tallying enemies, or just the university, looking to cover its ass either way. Inside, the dim room flickers with tablet and laptop screens as people pull up the app. Mnemosyne, Jesse explained to me once as we lay on the floor of his bedroom, sipping coffee from wine glasses, is an augmented reality application. It checks your location with your device’s GPS and overlays your screen with location-sensitive news. Censored news, he meant, censored images, photographs you shouldn’t see, stories no one should be reporting. I know Lisse is providing data for the project, and Jesse helped with the programming.

Everyone I’m fucking wants to overthrow the government.

(Well, Hythloday, why do you think that is?)

A small gray woman in a gray suit reads off her PowerPoint slides at the front of the room, and I lean against the wall in back, scanning the crowd for Jesse. He’s sitting in the second-to-last row, the strands of silver in his dark brown hair showing dramatically in the liquid-crystal glow of his laptop. His face and lips look as blue as a drowning man’s. I like to watch him like this, when he doesn’t know I’m looking. When he knows he’s being watched, when he’s teaching or lecturing, he becomes brilliant, sparkling, animated. His dark eyes and his smile widen, light up, his gentle laugh drags parentheses around the corners of his mouth. But when he’s alone, when he thinks no one is watching, he shrinks into himself. The laugh lines settle. He looks lost, like a book that someone has misplaced.

At the end of the lecture, he snaps his laptop shut, slings his bag over his shoulder. He catches sight of me on his way to the exit. He smiles too widely, looking exhausted.

“You weren’t expecting me,” I say. “I know.”

“No, it’s fine.” He licks his lips, which still look dry and blue. “Did you like the talk?”

“Sure,” I lie.

He turns abruptly and strides out of the lecture hall. I follow down the glossy corridor, out into the parking lot, where the mist rolls in from the river, smelling of rot. Jesse stops, leans against the wall of the auditorium, and his hair catches on the rough brick. He grabs me around the waist and drags me in for a kiss.

(Nine people contributed material to the Mnemosyne project, he told me, leaning against the pillows. The marks of my teeth were pale and raised along his shoulders. Four of them are anonymous. Five of them are missing.)

He clings to me like a drowning man, fingers digging into my back, bruising, his mouth opening beneath mine as though I could give him breath. He tastes like mint chewing gum and cigarette smoke. He winces when my tongue brushes against his teeth, but when I start to pull back, he whispers, “Don’t.”

(He kicked a stack of books off the side of the bed, yanking off his jacket and tie, and he told me to fuck him. I took the harness and the strap-on from the nightstand. He spread out on the bed, watching impatiently over his shoulder as I adjusted the buckles and straps around my thighs. The headlights from a car across the street slipped through the slats in the window blinds, caught his eyes, flattened them to smooth disks of gold.)

I weave my fingers through his, and he grunts in pain.

“Jesse.” I pull back. His sleeve cuffs gap above the buttons, and I can see the shining red marks on his wrists, marks my hands could never have left. The neck of his undershirt has slipped down, damp with mist and sweat, and bruises show under his skin, black and yellow and blue.

“Don’t worry about it,” he says. “Please. Just stay with me.”

(We fucked, and even though I was sober, it was the disjointed, disappointing sex of people who are drunk, and angry, and afraid.)

We take the train to his townhouse on the east side of the city. The streetlights around us glare like a hangover. Alone in the second-to-last compartment, he leans against my back, his cheek against my shoulder blade, his arms tight around my waist. “The dean wants to see me tomorrow,” he murmurs. I turn my head, looking for our reflection in the train window, but it’s too dark inside, too bright out.

(Afterward, he asked me to hold him. He curled around me, his head resting in the crook between my bicep and my breast, his arms around my hips. He didn’t say my name again. After a few minutes, his breathing settled. I kissed his cheek and tasted salt.)

3.

This city burns so often that every fire has a name. Ships burning, churches burning, schools and factories and luxury hotels. The S. S. Virgil fire, the St. John’s fire. On a windy day, you can still smell the smoke rising from St. John’s preparatory.

And when you aim the camera of your phone down at the sidewalk in front of the West Gate, down at the cracked cement with its tarry traces of chewing gum and bird shit, you can still see the outline of Mark Labelle’s blood, the smooth puddle that it left as he died on a cold Sunday afternoon in April, beaten to death by riot officers. The stain that was still there the next morning, when the body was packed away in a city morgue and the police surveillance video had disappeared. Gone, as they say, without a trace—except for this palimpsested slab of sidewalk, which someone snapped on their phone, which someone else uploaded to the Mnemosyne project, which now trickles through this elegant little app to the eyes of anyone who stands here beneath the wrought iron gate. Your own private haunting, in the palms of your hands.

There are dozens of places like this throughout the city, thanks to Lisse and Jesse and all the rest of them. Haunted places. Revolutions are made out of hauntings, out of missing bodies and ghosts.

Did you know that? I can assure you that the government does.

4.

Remedios and Gavin live above their gallery on Elliot Street, which has burned so many times that the new houses are all built out of concrete. Every surface north of 23rd is brightly painted: flag murals, forest scenes, mountain silhouettes, massive bare-breasted women with galaxies in their eyes. Walking up the sidewalks, listening to the cold reverberating echo of your footsteps, you get the feeling that this part of the city has transcended the organic. At least until you see the fast food wrappers caught in the grates of the pristine concrete sewers. Everything, even the wrappers, smells like stone and diesel.

Gavin is a sculptor, and he doesn’t mind this sort of thing. Remedios, though, rebels. Their back yard is full of tomatoes and bright yellow-flowered squash, and two fat hens cluck in the chicken coop beside the rusted bike rack.

The back stairs take you either into the gallery, through the second floor, or up to their apartment on the third. The gallery is always unlocked. I glance inside just long enough to see that Remedios’s Brutal exhibition is still on display, wall after wall of bare torsos with unspeakable scars. The gray, wine-stained carpet smells like dust, and there are fat black flies on the windowsills. A stray exhibition program flutters in the box by the fire escape, the title in red lower-case sans-serif: These are not the bodies we were born in. I let the door swing shut.

Upstairs, in the kitchen, Remedios is standing barefoot at the sink, washing cherry tomatoes and crying.

(You weren’t expecting to see me, I’d said, because none of them ever are.

No, he said, it’s fine.)

“Hythloday.” She drops the bowl into the sink, where it spins, clattering, spilling mottled red-and-yellow tomatoes across the gray ceramic. She flings her arms around my neck, stands on tiptoe, presses her flat chest against mine. Her hair is dark blue and shaved close to her head, and it smells like the gallery, like dry skin and abandonment.

(Please, just stay with me.)

She pulls me towards her on the bed, which is a low double-mattress in the front room, covered in shawls and old saris and stuffed animals. Her fingers are already undoing the buttons on my shirt. “Shouldn’t we wait for Gavin?” I ask, but she makes a sick squeaking sound.

“He isn’t here,” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“He’s gone, Hythloday.”

She tugs at my sleeves, and I ease myself down beside her on the mattress. “What do you mean?”

She shakes her head, falls silent. I kiss her forehead, and she rolls me over, pushes me back against the pillows with the dead weight of her body.

(Four of them were anonymous, Jesse had told me. Five of them are missing.)

Afterward, she curls up with her back against my stomach, a little spoon, or a snail in its shell. It feels strange not to have Gavin’s arms crossing mine above her small body, Gavin’s heady juniper smell in my nostrils. Remedios’s breathing slows, hitches, then steadies, like a ship breaking into deep water.

“We were marching up Tribunal,” she says. “There was a gathering at the West Gate. He thought we should be there, say a few words. The police arrived and we were separated.”

Somewhere in the neighborhood, a siren begins to wail. I kiss the back of her neck, and she looks over her shoulder.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?”

(Everyone I’m fucking is trying to overthrow the government.

Well, Hythloday, why do you think that is?)

I kiss her nose, her eyelids. “I don’t know,” I lie.

5.

“Hythloday?” Lisse crouches over me. Her fingers wind around the back of my neck, giving my hair a sharp tug. “In all seriousness. Why do all your lovers want to overthrow the government?”

“Guess I have a thing for rebels.”

“Seriously.”

“Mm-hm,” I say. Her face is unreadable. I close my eyes, lean back into her grip. “You’re all so electric, and so secretive. Meetings in dark alleys and warehouses, throwing bricks through Senate windows. It’s so sexy. And don’t get me started on the posters and the pamphlets and those long, lonely nights with a busted stapler in the back of the copy shop—”

She cuts me off with a kiss, dragging my head up to hers. Her mouth tastes like orange juice and almond chapstick, her lips bruisingly firm, her teeth sharp.

“Just for once,” she whispers, “I wish you would think.”

Think. As though I weren’t always thinking, too much for my own good. Thinking of her body, the scars I can see and the ones I can’t, the hipbones that jut prominently against my hands where they were once buried in flesh. Thinking of the marks shining on Jesse’s wrists and chest, of Remedios crying at her kitchen sink. Thinking about protestors and fire hoses, pepper spray, gunshots. Thinking of the history of this city, this apartment building and the fire that gutted it.

Thinking of being gutted. Being burned.

“All right, Lisse.” I rub my eyelids, smudging what’s left of yesterday’s liner. “Everyone I’m fucking realizes that this country is going to shit, and unlike me, they have the courage and integrity to do something about it. Fair?”

She doesn’t answer. I open my eyes. A flood of sunlight pours through the windows, sharp with afternoon. The living room is empty. When I look towards 9th and Tribunal, I see that the crowd of protestors has dispersed, leaving a single piece of wet posterboard in their wake.

6.

Hythloday. I suppose you caught the reference. A traveler in no-place, a stranger in Nowhere. My mother kicked me out when I was fifteen, and ever since, my only reliable roof has been the sky. The city of kites and crows. It doesn’t burn as easily as the city of flesh and blood, I’ll give it that. And there have been friends’ couches, lovers’ bedrooms: roosts for a night, or for a season. I have this image of myself flying across the city, from nest to nest, like something from a children’s story.

Where do the birds go during a revolution? I read somewhere that every pigeon in Paris flew away during the summer of 1793. It was so hot, and every street in the city stank of blood. I have no idea if any of that is true. I have this recurring dream of a guillotine blade falling, the thud of it scattering crows, like a spray of embers from a collapsing roof. They don’t settle again. Whatever died wasn’t to their taste.

The fire at St. John’s preparatory school began because a little girl stuck a match into a bird’s nest outside her dormitory window. Little girls are cruel, crueler far than ravens or guillotine blades, and flames in a wooden building travel faster than cruelty. Within seven minutes, everyone who was going to make it out alive had already left the building. They stood on 23rd street clutching their books, their dolls. Everyone else died. And some who got out died, too, later on, from the smoke.

I tell this story to Lisse, and she frowns. It is a story about all the things she loves: a story about home, about violence and brutality and revenge, about innocent bystanders.

But it is not a story about justice.

“Only ghost stories are about justice,” I say, and she shakes her head.

(How can you, of all people, believe in ghosts?)

7.

When I return to the gallery, there are flies everywhere.

(Where did the bruises come from? I asked Jesse. But they weren’t just bruises, not merely bruises, although the purple stain on his chest showed the treads of a military boot. The white and red marks on his arms, the stiffness in his fingers came from being cuffed, being tied, and tightly. I knew the signs.)

Remedios and I go into the bedroom and fuck and don’t say word about Gavin. She moves so stiffly that I’m afraid I’ve hurt her, but when I slow down, she twines her legs around me and hisses in my ear: “Don’t stop.” We fall asleep afterward, sore and exhausted.

Later still, I wake alone to the buzzing of the flies.

(The dean wants to see me tomorrow, he’d said, resting his cheek against my shoulder blade. And I couldn’t see our reflection in the window.)

And although it’s the last thing on earth that I want to do, although I can already smell the sour stink in the dusty carpet, I go down to the gallery. Down to the first floor, where the flies are thickest. Down to the back room.

(Jesse’s things are scattered across the bedroom floor. His books, cracked along the spine. His ties and jackets and dress shirts, torn from their hangers and crumpled, dirtied with the muddy prints of boots. The contents of the nightstand, small and obscene in the light of day.)

I see the folding chair first, collapsed in the center of the room beneath the light fixture. And she sways at the end of something that shows bright orange against her blue hair: an electric cord. She’s been here for a while now. Her limbs have gone stiff, her tongue black against her pale chin.

I stand on the chair to cut her down. When she lands in my arms, I lose my balance, fall to the floor with a solid, bruising thud.

8.

On the train back to 9th street, the woman in the seat across from me is reading something on her tablet. She looks up at me, suddenly. Without saying a word, she cries, and cries, and cries.

9.

None of us has the body we were born in. Life leaves its traces, its teeth marks on our throats, its maps across our thighs and in our fingertips, its footprints on our chests. The body that I was born in didn’t have breasts, didn’t have hips, and I didn’t know it had a cunt until I was nine years old. Love leaves its traces on us, and hate.

I fill the antique tub in Lisse’s bathroom until the frigid water flows over the edge, splashing across the dark green tile floor. I close my eyes, plug my nose, plunge to the bottom. Even under water, I smell burning.

I’ve stopped binding recently, stood in front of the mirror on the back of the bathroom door and cupped my breasts the way I used to cup Lisse’s. It felt alien. Not wrong, just not mine. I think of Lisse’s tattoo, the marks on Jesse’s wrists and neck and chest. I think of the slight weight of Remedios, dangling from an electric cord noose. And I think damage is what teaches us to inhabit our bodies, and everyone I love has learned that long before me.

At last, I come up for air, and Lisse is waiting for me, sitting on the edge of the tub in her flannel robe. “What’s wrong, Hythloday?” she asks.

But nothing’s wrong. I’m unscathed.

“It’s my gift,” I say softly. “My own special talent. I don’t follow the crowd, and I never have. I don’t get caught up in things. The world is on fire and I don’t even feel the heat.”

I reach for her, and she isn’t there.

I get out of the tub, wrap a fraying towel around my waist, go into the hallway. The door to her room is on my right. I put my fingertips on the handle, hoping it will be locked, but it isn’t, it swings soundlessly open.

The smell of smoke and scorched hair and wet carbon rushes out. Inside, everything is covered in a layer of dust.

END

“The City of Kites and Crows” is copyright Megan Arkenberg, 2016, and was originally published in Kaleidotrope.

This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library.

You can support GlitterShip by checking out our Patreon at patreon.com/keffy, subscribing to our feed, or by leaving reviews on iTunes.

Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back soon with “Never Alone, Never Unarmed,” an original story by Bobby Sun.

It’ll be fun, he’d said. Everyone’s doing it. You don’t have to be looking for romance, it’s just a good way to meet people.

“I don’t think it’s about romance at all,” Sabella said. She wove her flower crown into her braids so that the wire skeleton was hidden beneath strands of hair. “I think if you caught a congressman doing this, he’d have to resign.”

“That’s ’cause we’ve never had a vampire congressman,” Dedrick said. He rearranged her so that her shoulders fell from their habitual place at her ears, her chin pointed up, and snapped photos of her. “Step forward a little—there, you look more like yourself in that light.”

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 57 for May 21st, 2018. This is your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to share this story with you.

GlitterShip is now part of the Audible afflilate program. What this means is that just by listening to GlitterShip, you are eligible to get a free audio book and 30 day trial at Audible to check out the service.

If you’re looking for more queer science fiction to listen to, there’s a full audio book available of the Lightspeed Magazine “Queers Destroy Science Fiction” special issue, featuring stories by a large number of queer authors, including John Chu, Chaz Brenchley, Rose Lemberg, and many others.

Today I have a story and a poem for you. The poem is “Dionysus in London” by Tristan Beiter.

Tristan Beiter is a student at Swarthmore College studying English Literature and Gender and Sexuality Studies. He loves reading poetry and speculative fiction, some of his favorite books being The Waste Land, HD’s Trilogy, Mark Doty’s Atlantis, Frances Hardinge’s Gullstruck Island, and Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles. When not reading or writing, he can usually be found crafting absurdities with his boyfriend or yelling about literary theory.

Dionysus in London

by Tristan Beiter

The day exploded, you know.

Last night a woman
with big bouffant hair told
me, “Show me a story
where the daughter runs into a stop
sign and it literally turns into a white flower.”

I fail to describe
a total eclipse and the throne
of petrified wood sank
into the lakebed.

James made love to Buckingham
while I pulled the honeysuckle
to me, made a flower crown for
the leopards flanking me
while I watched red
and white invert themselves, white
petals pushing from the center of the sign
as the post wilted until all
that remained was a giant lotus
on the storm grate waiting
to rot or wash away.

I let it stay there while the Scottish
king hid behind the Scottish play
and walked behind me, one eye out
for the mark left when locked in.
You go witchy in there—or at least
you—or he, or I—learn to be afraid
of the big coats and brass
buttons, like the ones in every hall
closet; you never know if they will turn,
like yours, into bats and bugs and giant
tarantulas made from wire hangers.

The woman showed me
our reflections in the shop window
while one or the other
man in the palace polished
the silver for his lover’s table
and asked me who
I loved; I decided
on the cream
linen, since the wool
was too close to the pea coat
that hung

by your door.
I suppose that the cat
is under the car; that’s probably where it fled to
as we walked, knowing
we already found that
the ivy in your hair was artificial
as the bacchanal, or your
evasion, Sire, of the question
(and of the serpents who are well
worth the well
offered to them with the wet wax
on my crown). I

suppose the car is under the cat,
in which case it must be a very large
cat, or else a very small car.
I eat your teeth. I see brilliantine teeth floating
in her thick red lipstick. James
tears apart the rhododendron
chattering (about) his incisors
and remembering the flesh
and—nothing so exotic
as a Sphinx, maybe a dust
mote or lip-marks
left on the large leather chaise.
Teeth gleam from the shadows
where I wait, thyrsus
raised with the cone
almost touching the roof
of the forest, to drown

in a peacock
as it swallows (chimney
swifts?) the sun—or
was it son—or maybe it was
just a grape I fed it so
it would eat the spiders
crawling from the closet.
It struts across the palace green
like it owns the place, like
it will replace the hunting-
grounds with fields of straggling
mint that the king
would never ask for.

The woman teases
up her hair before the mirror, filling
the restroom with hairspray
and big laughs before walking back
into the restaurant, where we
wait to make ourselves
over—the way the throne did
when the wood crumbled under the
pressure of an untold story,
leaving nothing but crystals and dust.

We argued for an hour over
whether to mix leaves and
flowers, plants and gems,
before settling on four
crowns, one for each of us.

Her hair mostly covers hers.
The cats will love it though,
playing with teeth
that were knocked into your wine
in the barfight (why did you
order wine in a place
like that, Buck?) and you
got replaced with gold, like I
wear woven in my braids
as the sun sets on the daughter
that, unsurprisingly, none
of us have. But

if we did, she would turn yield
signs into dahlias and
that would be the sign
to move on with the leopards
and their flashing teeth and
brass eyes and listen.
To the walls and rivers,
to the sculpture that is far
whiter than me falling. And
to the peacock which has just
eaten another bug so you don’t have to
kill it. Get yourself a dresser
and cover it with white enamel
it’ll hold up, and no insects
live in dressers. Keep

the ivy and the pinecone
in a mother-of-pearl trinket box
with your plastic volumizing hair
inserts and jeweled combs.
And put a cat and dolphin
on it, to remember.

Next, our short story this episode is “You Inside Me” by Tori Curtis

Tori Curtis writes speculative fiction with a focus on LGBT and disability issues. She is the author of one novel, Eelgrass, and a handful of short stories. You can find her at toricurtiswrites.com and on Twitter at @tcurtfish, where she primarily tweets about how perfect her wife is.

CW: For descriptions of traumatic surgery.

You Inside Me

by Tori Curtis

It’ll be fun, he’d said. Everyone’s doing it. You don’t have to be looking for romance, it’s just a good way to meet people.

“I don’t think it’s about romance at all,” Sabella said. She wove her flower crown into her braids so that the wire skeleton was hidden beneath strands of hair. “I think if you caught a congressman doing this, he’d have to resign.”

“That’s ’cause we’ve never had a vampire congressman,” Dedrick said. He rearranged her so that her shoulders fell from their habitual place at her ears, her chin pointed up, and snapped photos of her. “Step forward a little—there, you look more like yourself in that light.”

He took fifteen minutes to edit her photos (“they’ll expect you to use a filter, so you might as well,”) and pop the best ones on her profile.

Suckr: the premier dating app for vampires and their fanciers.

“It’s like we’re cats,” she said.

“I heard you like cats,” he agreed, and she sighed.

Hi, I’m Sabella. I’ve been a vampire since I was six years old, and I do not want to see or be seen by humans. I’m excited to meet men and women between the ages of eighteen and sixty-five.

“That’s way too big of an age range,” Dedrick said. “You want to be compatible with these people.”

“Yeah, compatible. Like my tissue type.”

“You don’t want to end up flirting with a grandpa.”

I’m excited to meet men and women between the ages of twenty and thirty-five.

I’m most proud of my master’s degree.

You should message me if you’re brave and crazy.

It took days, not to mention Dedrick’s exasperated return, before she went back on Suckr. She paced up the beautiful wood floors of her apartment, turning on heel at the sole window on the long end and the painted-over cast-iron radiator on the short. When she felt too sick to take care of herself, her mom came over and put Rumors on, wrapped her in scarves that were more pretty than functional, warmed some blood and gave it to her in a sippy cup. Sabella remembered nothing so much as the big Slurpees her mom had bought her, just this bright red, when she’d had strep the last year she was human.

She wore the necklace Dedrick had given her every day. It was a gold slice of pepperoni pizza with “best” emblazoned on the back (his matched, but read “friends,”), and she fondled it like a hangnail. She rubbed the bruises on her arms, where the skin had once been clear and she’d once thought herself pretty in a plain way, like Elinor Dashwood, as though she might be able to brush off the dirt.

She called her daysleeper friends, texted acquaintances, and slowly stopped responding to their messages as she realized how bored she was of presenting hope day after day.

2:19:08 bkissedrose: I’m so sorry.

2:19:21 bkissedrose: I feel like such a douche

2:19:24 sabellasay: ???

2:20:04 sabellasay: what r u talkin about

2:25:56 bkissedrose: u talked me down all those times I would’ve just died

2:26:08 sabellasay: it was rly nbd

2:26:27 bkissedrose: I’ve never been half as good as you are

2:26:48 bkissedrose: and now you’re so sick

2:29:12 sabellasay: dude stop acting like i’m dying

2:29:45 sabellasay: I can’t stand it

2:30:13 bkissedrose: god you’re so brave

(sabellasay has become inactive)

“Everyone keeps calling me saying you stopped talking to them,” Dedrick said when he made it back to her place, shoes up on the couch now that he’d finally wiped them of mud. “Should I feel lucky you let me in?”

“I’m tired,” she said. “It’s supposed to be a symptom. I like this one, I think she has potential.”

He took her phone and considered it with the weight of a father researching a car seat. “A perfect date: I take you for a ride around the lake on my bike, then we stop home for an evening snack.”

“She means her motorcycle,” Sabella clarified.

He rolled his eyes and continued reading. “My worst fear: commitment.”

“At least she’s honest.”

“That’s not really a good thing. You’re not looking for someone to skip out halfway through the movie.”

“No, I’m looking for someone who’s not going to be heartbroken when I die anyway.”

Dedrick sighed, all the air going out of his chest as it might escape from dough kneaded too firmly, and held her close to him. “You’re stupid,” he told her, “but so sweet.”

“I think I’m going to send her a nip.”

The girl was named Ash but she spelled it A-I-S-L-I-N-G, and she seemed pleased that Sabella knew enough not to ask lots of stupid questions. They met in a park by the lakeside, far enough from the playground that none of the parents would notice the fanged flirtation going on below.

If Aisling had been a boy, she would have been a teen heartthrob. She wore her hair long where it was slicked back and short (touchable, but hard to grab in a fight) everywhere else. She wore a leather jacket that spoke of a once-in-a-lifetime thrift store find, and over the warmth of her blood and her breath she smelled like bag balm. Sabella wanted to hide in her arms from a fire. She wanted to watch her drown trying to save her.

Aisling parked her motorcycle and stowed her helmet before coming over to say hi—gentlemanly, Sabella thought, to give her a chance to prepare herself.

“What kind of scoundrel left you to wait all alone?” Aisling asked, with the sort of effortlessly cool smile that might have broken a lesser woman’s heart.

“I don’t know,” Sabella said, “but I’m glad you’re here now.”

Aisling stepped just inside her personal space and frowned. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude,” she said, “but are you—”

“I’m trans, yes,” Sabella interrupted, and smiled so wide she could feel the tension at her temples. Like doing sit-ups the wrong way for years, having this conversation so many times hadn’t made it comfortable, only routine. “We don’t need to be awkward about it.”

“Okay,” Aisling agreed, and sat on the bench, helping Sabella down with a hand on her elbow. “I meant that you seem sick.”

She looked uneasy, and Sabella sensed that she had never been human. Vampires didn’t get sick—she had probably never had more than a headache, and that only from hunger.

“I hope you won’t be too disappointed when it finds you,” Aisling said, and Sabella blushed, reoriented herself with a force like setting a bone, like if she tried hard enough to move in one direction she’d stop feeling like a spinning top.

“I’m looking for a donor,” she said.

“Yeah, all right,” Aisling said. She threw her arm over the back of the bench so that Sabella felt folded into her embrace. “I’m always willing to help a pretty girl out.”

“I don’t just mean your blood,” she said, and felt herself dizzy.

It was easier for Sabella to convince someone to do something than it was for her to ask for it. Her therapist had told her that, and even said it was common, but he hadn’t said how to fix it. “Please, may I have your liver” was too much to ask, and “Please, I don’t want to die” was a poor argument.

“So, you would take my liver—”

“It would actually only be part of your liver,” Sabella said, stopping to catch her breath. She hadn’t been able to go hiking since she’d gotten so sick—she needed company, and easy trails, and her friends either didn’t want to go or, like her mom, thought it was depressing to watch her climb a hill and have to stop to spit up bile.

“So we would each have half my liver, in the end.”

Sabella shrugged and looked into the dark underbrush. If she couldn’t be ethical about this, she wouldn’t deserve a liver. She wouldn’t try to convince Aisling until she understood the facts. “In humans, livers will regenerate once you cut them in half and transplant them. Like how kids think if you cut an earthworm in half, you get two. Or like bulbs. Ideally, it would go like that.”

“And if it didn’t go ideally?”

(“Turn me,” Dedrick said one day, impulsively, when she’d been up all night with a nosebleed that wouldn’t stop, holding her in his lap with his shirt growing polka-dotted. “I’ll be a vampire in a few days, we can have the surgery—you’ll be cured in a week.”)

“If it doesn’t go ideally,” Sabella said, “one or both of us dies. If it goes poorly, I don’t even know what happens.”

She stepped off the tree and set her next target, a curve in the trail where a tree had fallen and the light shone down on the path. Normally these days she didn’t wear shoes but flip-flops, but this was a date, and she’d pulled her old rainbow chucks out of the closet. Aisling walked with her silently, keeping pace, and put an arm around her waist.

Sabella looked up and down the trail. Green Lake was normally populated enough that people kept to their own business, and these days she felt pretty safe going about, even with a girl. But she checked anyway before she leaned into Ais’s strength, letting her guide them so that she could use all her energy to keep moving.

“But if it doesn’t happen at all, you die no matter what?”

Sabella took a breath. “If you don’t want to, I look for someone else.”

Her mom was waiting for her when Sabella got home the next morning.

Sabella’s mother was naturally blonde, tough when she needed to be, the sort of woman who could get into hours-long conversations with state fair tchotchke vendors. She’d gotten Sabella through high school and into college through a careful application of stamping and yelling. When Sabella had started calling herself Ravynn, she’d brought a stack of baby name books home and said, “All right, let’s find you something you can put on a resume.”

“Mom,” she said, but smiling, “I gave you a key in case I couldn’t get out of bed, not so you could check if I spent the night with a date.”

“How’d it go? Was this the girl Dedrick helped you find?”

“Aisling, yeah,” Sabella said. She sat on the recliner, a mountain of accent pillows cushioning her tender body. “It was good. I like her a lot.”

“Did she decide to get the surgery?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask her to choose.”

“Then what did you two do all night?”

Sabella frowned. “I like her a lot. We had a good time.”

Her mom stood and put the kettle on, and Sabella couldn’t help thinking what an inconvenience she was, that her mother couldn’t fret over her by making toast and a cup of tea. “Christ, what decent person would want to do that with you?”

“We have chemistry! She’s very charming!”

She examined Sabella with the dissatisfied air of an artist. “You’re a mess, honey. You’re so orange you could be a jack-o-lantern, and swollen all over. You look like you barely survived a dogfight. I don’t even see my daughter when I look at you anymore.”

Sabella tried to pull herself together, to look more dignified, but instead she slouched further into the recliner and crossed her arms over her chest. “Maybe she thinks I’m funny, or smart.”

“Maybe she’s taking advantage. Anyone who really cared about you wouldn’t be turned on, they’d be worried about your health.”

Sabella remembered the look on Aisling’s face when she’d first come close enough to smell her, and shuddered. “I’m not going to ask her to cut out part of her body for me without thinking about it first,” she said.

“Without giving her something in return?” her mom asked. “It’s less than two pounds.”

“But it’s still her choice,” Sabella said.

“I’m starting to wonder if you even want to live,” her mom said, and left.

Sabella found the energy to go turn off the stovetop before she fell asleep. (Her mother had raised her responsible.)

12:48:51 bkissedrose: what happens to a dream bestowed

12:49:03 bkissedrose: upon a girl too weak to fight for it?

12:53:15 sabellasay: haha you can’t sleep either?

12:53:38 sabellasay: babe idk

12:55:43 sabellasay: is it better to have loved and lost

12:56:29 sabellasay: than to die a virgin?

1:00:18 bkissedrose: I guess I don’t know

1:01:24 bkissedrose: maybe it depends if they’re good

“It’s nice here,” Aisling confessed the third time they visited the lake. Sabella and her mom weren’t talking, but she couldn’t imagine it would last more than a few days longer, so she wasn’t worried. “I’d never even heard of it.”

“I grew up around here,” Sabella said, “and I used to take my students a few times a year.”

“You teach?”

“I used to teach,” she said, and stepped off the trail—the shores were made up of a gritty white sand like broken shells—to watch the sinking sun glint off the water. “Seventh grade science.”

Aisling laughed. “That sounds like a nightmare.”

“I like that they’re old enough you can do real projects with them, but before it breaks off into—you know, are we doing geology or biology or physics. When you’re in seventh grade, everything is science.” She smiled and closed her eyes so that she could feel the wind and the sand under her shoes. She could hear birds settling and starting to wake, but she couldn’t place them. “They’ve got a long-term sub now. Theoretically, if I manage to not die, I get my job back.”

Aisling came up behind her and put her arms around her. Sabella knew she hadn’t really been weaving—she knew her limits well enough now, she hoped—but she felt steadier that way. “You don’t sound convinced.”

“I don’t think they expect to have to follow through,” Sabella admitted. “Sometimes I think I’m the only one who ever thinks I’m going to survive this. My mom’s so scared all the time, I know she doesn’t.”

Aisling held her not tight but close, like being tucked into a bright clean comforter on a cool summer afternoon. “Can I ask you a personal question?” she said, her face up against Sabella’s neck so that every part of Sabella wanted her to bite.

“Maybe,” she said, then thought better of it. “Yes.”

“How’d you get sick? I didn’t think we could catch things like that. Or was it while you were human?”

“Um, no, but I’m not contagious, just nasty.” Aisling laughed, and she continued, encouraged. “Mom would, you know, once I came out I could do pretty much whatever I wanted, but she wouldn’t let me get any kind of reconstructive surgery until I was eighteen. She thought it was creepy, some doc getting his hands all over her teenage kid.”

“Probably fair.”

“So I’m eighteen, and she says okay, you’re right, you got good grades in school and you’re going to college like I asked, I’ll pay for whatever surgery you want. And you have to imagine, I just scheduled my freshman orientation, I have priorities.”

“Which are?”

“Getting laid, mostly.”

“Yeah, I remember that.”

“So I’m eighteen and hardly ever been kissed, I’m not worried about the details. I don’t let my mom come with me, it doesn’t even occur to me to see a doctor who’s worked with vampires before, I just want to look like Audrey Hepburn’s voluptuous sister.”

“Oh no,” Ash said. It hung there for a moment, the dread and Sabella’s not being able to regret that she’d been so stupid. “It must have come up.”

“Sure. He said he was pretty sure it would be possible to do the surgery on a vampire, he knew other surgeries had been done. I was just so excited he didn’t say no.”

Ash held her tight then, like she might be dragged away otherwise, and Sabella knew that it had nothing to do with her in particular, that it was only the protective instinct of one person watching another live out her most plausible nightmare. “What did he do to you?”

“It wasn’t his fault,” she said, and then—grimacing, she knew her mother would have been so angry with her—“at least, he didn’t mean anything by it. He never read anything about how to adapt the procedure to meet my needs.” She sounded so clinical, like she’d imbibed so many doctors’ explanations of what had happened that she was drunk on it. “But neither did I. We both found out you can’t give vampires a blood transfusion.”

“Why would you need to?”

She shrugged. “You don’t, usually, in plastic surgery.”

“No,” Aisling interrupted, “I mean, why wouldn’t you drink it?”

Sabella tried to remember, or tried not to be able to, and tucked her cold hands into her pockets. “You’re human, I guess. Anyway, I puked all over him and the incision sites, had to be hospitalized. My doctor says I’m lucky I’m such a good healer, or I’d need new boobs and a new liver.”

They were both quiet, and Sabella thought, this is it. You either decide it’s too much or you kiss me again.

She thought, I miss getting stoned with friends and telling shitty surgery stories and listening to them laugh. I hate that when I meet girls their getting-to-know-you involves their Youtube make-up tutorials and mine involves “and then, after they took the catheter out…”

“Did you sue for malpractice, at least?” Ash asked, and Sabella couldn’t tell without looking if her tone was teasing or wistful.

“My mom did, yeah. When they still wanted her to pay for the damn surgery.”

Aisling pulled up to the front of Sabella’s building and stopped just in front of her driveway. She kicked her bike into park and stepped onto the sidewalk, helping Sabella off and over the curbside puddle. Sabella couldn’t find words for what she was thinking, she was so afraid that her feelings would shatter as they crystallized. She wanted Ais to brush her hair back from her face and comb out the knots with her fingers. She wanted Ais to stop by to shovel the drive when there was lake effect snow. She wanted to find ‘how to minimize jaundice’ in the search history of Aisling’s phone.

“You’re beautiful in the sunlight,” Ais said, breaking her thoughts, maybe on purpose. “Like you were made to be outside.”

Sabella ducked her head and leaned up against her. The date was supposed to be over, go inside and let this poor woman get on with her life, but she didn’t want to leave. “It’s nice to have someone to go with me,” she said. “Especially with a frost in the air. Sometimes people act like I’m so fragile.”

“Ridiculous. You’re a vampire.”

Her ears were cold, and she pressed them against Aisling’s jawbone. She wondered what the people driving past thought when they saw them. She thought that maybe the only thing better than surviving would be to die a tragic death, loved and loyally attended. “I was born human.”

“Even God makes mistakes.”

Sabella smiled. “Is that what I am? A mistake?”

“Nah,” she said. “Just a happy accident.”

Sabella laughed, thought you’re such a stoner and I feel so safe when you look at me like that.

“I’ll do it,” Ais said. “What do I have to do to set up the surgery?”

Sabella hugged her tight, hid against her and counted the seconds—one, two, three, four, five—while Ais didn’t change her mind and Sabella wondered if she would.

“I have to stress how potentially dangerous this is,” Dr. Young said. “I can’t guarantee that it will work, that either of you will survive the procedure or the recovery, or that you won’t ultimately regret it.”

Aisling was holding it together remarkably well, Sabella thought, but she still felt like she could catch her avoiding eye contact. Sabella had taken the seat in the doctor’s office between her mother and girlfriend, and felt uncomfortable and strange no matter which of their hands she held.

“Um,” Ais said, and Sabella could feel her mother’s judgment at her incoherence, “you said you wouldn’t be able to do anything for the pain?”

To her credit, the doctor didn’t fidget or look away. Sabella, having been on the verge of death long enough to become something of a content expert, believed that it was important to have a doctor who was upfront about how terrible her life was. “I wouldn’t describe it as ‘nothing,’ exactly,” she said. “There aren’t any anesthetics known to work on vampires, but we’ll make you as comfortable as possible. You can feed immediately before and as soon as you’re done, and that will probably help snow you over.”

Aisling said, “Well, while we’re trying to make me comfortable, can I smoke up, too?”

Dr. Young laughed. It wasn’t cruel, but it wasn’t promising, either. “That’s not a terrible idea,” she said, “but marijuana increases bleeding, and there are so many unknown variables here that I’d like to stick to best practices if we can.”

“I can just—” Sabella said, and choked. She wasn’t sure when she’d started crying. “Find someone else. Dedrick will do it, I know.”

Aisling considered this. The room was quiet, soft echoes on the peeling tile floor. Sabella’s mother put an arm around her, and she felt tiny, but in the way that made her feel ashamed and not protected. Aisling said, “Why are you asking me? Is there something you know that I don’t?”

Dr. Young shook her head. “I promise we’re not misrepresenting the procedure,” she said. “And theoretically, it might be possible with any vampire. But there aren’t a lot of organ transplants in the literature—harvesting, sure, but not living transplants—and I want to get it right the first time. If we have a choice, I told Sabella I’d rather use a liver from a donor who was born a vampire. I think it’ll increase our chance of success.”

“One of the first things we’ll do is to cut through almost all of your abdominal nerves, so that will help. And there’s a possibility that the experience will be so intense that you don’t remember it clearly, or at all.”

Sabella’s mother took a shaky breath, and Sabella wished, hating herself for it, that she hadn’t come.

Ais said, “Painful. You mean, the experience will be so painful.”

“If you choose to go forward with it,” Dr. Young said, “we’ll do everything we can to mitigate that.”

Sabella had expected that Aisling would want space and patience while she decided not to die a horrible, painful death to save her. It was hard to tell how instead they ended up in her bed with the lights out, their legs wound together and their faces swollen with sleep. Sabella was shaking, and couldn’t have said why. Ais grabbed her by her seat and pulled her up close.

“You said you couldn’t get me sick?” she asked.

“No,” Sabella agreed. “Although my blood is probably pretty toxic.”

Ais kissed her, the smell of car exhaust still stuck in her hair. “What a metaphor,” she murmured, and lifted her chin. “You look exhausted.”

Sabella thought, Are you saying what I think you’re saying? and, That’s a terrible idea, and said, “God, I want to taste you.”

“Well, baby,” Ais said, and her hands were on Sabella so she curled her lips and blew her hair out of her eyes, “that’s what I’m here for.”

Sabella had been human once, and she remembered what food was like. The standard lie, that drinking blood was like eating a well-cooked steak, was wrong but close enough to staunch the flow of an interrogation. (She’d had friends and exes, turned as adults, who said it was like a good stout on tap, hefty and refreshing, but she thought they might just be trying to scandalize her.)

Ais could have been a stalk of rhubarb or August raspberries. She moved under Sabella and held her so that their knees pressed together. She could have been the thrill of catching a fat thorny toad in among the lettuce at dusk, or a paper wasp in a butterfly net. She felt like getting tossed in the lake in January; she tasted like being wrapped in fleece and gently dried before the fire; her scent was what Sabella remembered of collapsing, limbs aquiver, on the exposed bedrock of a mountaintop, nothing but crushed pine and the warmth of a moss-bed.

She woke on top of Ais, licking her wounds lazily—she wanted more, but she was too tired to do anything about it.

“That’s better,” Ais whispered, and if she was disappointed that this wasn’t turning into a frenzy, she didn’t show it. They were quiet for long enough that the haze started to fade, and then Aisling said, “I couldn’t ask in front of your mother, but was it like that with your surgery? They couldn’t do anything for the pain?”

Sabella shifted uncomfortably, rolled over next to Ais. “I was conscious, yes.”

“Do you remember it?”

It was a hard question. She wanted to say it wasn’t her place to ask. She tried to remember, and got caught up in the layers of exhaustion, the spaces between the body she’d had, the body she’d wanted, and what they had been doing to her. “Sounds and sensations and thoughts, mostly,” she said.

Ais choked, and said, “So, everything,” and Sabella realized—she didn’t know how she hadn’t—how scared she must be.

“No, it’s blurry,” she said instead. “I remember, um, the tugging at my chest. I kept thinking there was no way my skin wasn’t just going to split open. And the scraping sounds. They’ve got all these tools, and they’re touching you on the inside and the outside at the same time, and that’s very unsettling. And this man, I think he was the PA, standing over me saying, ‘You’ve got to calm down, honey.’”

“Were you completely freaking out?” Ais asked.

Sabella shook her head. Her throat hurt. “No. I mean—I cried a little. Not as much as you’d think. They said if I wasn’t careful, you know, with swallowing at the right times and breathing steady, they might mess up reshaping my larynx and I could lose my voice.”

Ais swore, and Sabella wondered if she would feel angry. (Sometimes she would scream and cry, say, can you imagine doing that to an eighteen-year-old?) Right now she was just tired. “How did you manage?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I think just, it was worth more to me to have it done than anything else. So I didn’t ever tell them to stop.”

“Please don’t go around telling people I think this is an acceptable surgical set-up,” Dr. Young said, looking around the exam room.

It reminded Sabella of a public hearing, the way the stakeholders sat at opposing angles and frowned at each other. Dr. Young sat next to Dr. Park, who would be the second doctor performing the procedure. Sabella had never met Dr. Park before, and her appearance—young, mostly—didn’t inspire confidence. Sabella sat next to her mother, who held her hand and a clipboard full of potential complications. Ais crossed her fingers in her lap, sat with a nervous child’s version of polite interest. Time seemed not to blur, but to stutter, everything happening whenever.

“Dr. Park,” Sabella’s mother said, “do you have any experience operating on vampires?”

Dr. Park grinned and her whole mouth seemed to open up in her face, her gums pale pink as a Jolly Rancher and her left fang chipped. “Usually trauma or obstetrics,” she admitted. “Although this is nearly the same thing.”

“I’m serious,” Sabella’s mom said, and Sabella interrupted.

“I like her,” she said. And then—it wasn’t really a question except in the sense that there was no way anyone could be sure—“You’re not going to realize halfway through the surgery that it’s too much for you?”

Dr. Park laughed. “I turned my husband when we were both eighteen,” she said as testament to her cruelty.

Sabella’s mom jumped. “Jesus Christ, why?”

She shrugged, languid. Ais and Dr. Young were completely calm; Ais might have had no frame of reference for what it was like to watch someone turn, and Dr. Young had probably heard this story before. “His parents didn’t like that he was dating a vampire. You’ll do crazy things for love.”

Sabella could see her mother blanch even as she steadied. It wasn’t unheard of for a vampire to turn their spouse—less common now that it was easier to live as a vampire, and humans were able to date freely but not really commit. But she could remember being turned, young as she had been: the gnawing ache, the hallucinations, the thirst that had only sometimes eclipsed the pain. It was still the worst thing that she’d ever experienced, and she was sure her mother couldn’t understand why anyone would choose to do it to someone they loved.

“Good,” she said. “You won’t turn back if we scream.”

Dr. Young frowned. “I want you to know you have a choice,” she said. She was speaking to Ais; Sabella had a choice, too, but it was only between one death and another. “There will be a point when you can’t change your mind, but by then it’ll be almost over.”

Ais swore. It made Dr. Park smile and Sabella’s mom frown. Sabella wondered if she was in love with her, or if it was impossible to be in love with someone who was growing a body for them to share. “Don’t say that,” Ais said. “I don’t want to have that choice.”

The morning of the surgery, Aisling gave Sabella a rosary to wear with her pizza necklace, and when they kicked Sabella’s mom out to the waiting room, she kissed them both as she went. “I like your mom,” Ais said shyly. They lay in cots beside each other, just close enough that they could reach out and hold hands across the gap. “I bet she’d get along with mine.”

Sabella laughed, her eyes stinging, threw herself across the space between them and kissed each of Ais’s knuckles while Ais said, “Aw, c’mon, save it ‘til we get home.”

They drank themselves to gorging while nurses wrapped and padded them in warm blankets. Ais was first, for whatever measure of mercy that was, and while they were wheeled down the dizzying white hallway, she grinned at Sabella, wild, some stranger’s blood staining her throat to her nose. “You’re a real looker,” she said, and Sabella laughed over her tears.

“Thank you,” Sabella said. “I mean, really, for everything.”

Ais winked at her; Sabella wanted to run away from all of this and drink her in until they died. “It’s all in a day’s work, ma’am,” she said.

It wasn’t, it couldn’t have been, and Sabella loved her for pretending. Ais hissed, she cried, she asked intervention of every saint learned in K-12 at a Catholic school. A horrible gelatinous noise came as Dr. Young’s gloves touched her innards, and Ais moaned and Sabella said, “You have to stop, this is awful,” and the woman assigned to supervise her held her down and said hush, honey, you need to be quiet. And the doctors’ voices, neither gentle nor unkind: We’re almost done now, Aisling, you’re being so brave. And: It’s a pity she’s too strong to pass out.

Sabella went easier, hands she couldn’t see wiping her down and slicing her open while Dr. Park pulled Ais’s insides back together. She’d been scared for so long that the pain didn’t frighten her; she kept asking “Is she okay? What’s happening?” until the woman at her head brushed back her hair and said shh, she’s in the recovery room, you can worry about yourself now.

It felt right, fixing her missteps with pieces of Ais, and when Dr. Young said, “There we go, just another minute and you can go take care of her yourself,” Sabella thought about meromictic lakes, about stepping into a body so deep its past never touched its present.

END

“Dionysus in London” is copyright Tristan Beiter 2018.

“You Inside Me” is copyright Tori Curtis 2018.

This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library.

You can support GlitterShip by checking out our Patreon at patreon.com/keffy, subscribing to our feed, or by leaving reviews on iTunes.

Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back soon with a reprint of “The City of Kites and Crows” by Megan Arkenberg.

Njàbò, my only child, my daughter, walks with me. She is as old as the forest, while I was born but three and a half decades ago. Our ears prick up at the sound of drums. We scan the sky and spot a column of smoke to the northwest. We run toward it. The ground trembles under our feet.

The settlement is ringed by rotting carcasses. Their faces are mutilated, but the meat is left uneaten. These are the bodies of our people.

I weep, but Njàbò is past tears. She sheds her calf body. Njàbò the great, the wise, the ancient thunders with anger; her flapping ears rouse the wind.

[Full transcript after the cut.]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 56. This is your host Keffy, and I’m super excited to be sharing this story with you.

Our story today is Njàbò by Claude Lalumière, read by Leigh Wallace.

Claude Lalumière (claudepages.info) is the author of Objects of Worship (2009), The Door to Lost Pages (2011), Nocturnes and Other Nocturnes (2013), and Venera Dreams: A Weird Entertainment (2017). He has published more than 100 stories, several of which have been adapted for stage, screen, audio, and comics. His books and stories have been translated into seven languages. Originally from Montreal, he now lives in Ottawa.

Leigh Wallace is a Canadian writer, artist and public servant. You can find her latest story in Tesseracts 19: Superhero Universe and her art at leighfive.deviantart.com

Njàbò

by Claude Lalumière

Njàbò, my only child, my daughter, walks with me. She is as old as the forest, while I was born but three and a half decades ago. Our ears prick up at the sound of drums. We scan the sky and spot a column of smoke to the northwest. We run toward it. The ground trembles under our feet.

The settlement is ringed by rotting carcasses. Their faces are mutilated, but the meat is left uneaten. These are the bodies of our people.

I weep, but Njàbò is past tears. She sheds her calf body. Njàbò the great, the wise, the ancient thunders with anger; her flapping ears rouse the wind.

Njàbò charges the human settlement, trumpeting her fury. Everywhere there is ivory, carved into jewellery and other trinkets, evidence of the mutilation of our people. She squeezes the life out of the humans and pounds them on the ground. The humans and their houses are crushed beneath the powerful feet of the giant Njàbò. She kicks down the fireplaces and tramples the ashes. She screams her triumph.

Njàbò’s shouts go on for hours. Our scattered tribe gathers from around the world to the site of Njàbò’s victory.

Throughout all of this I have been weeping, from pride and awe at Njàbò’s beauty, from horror at the deaths of both elephants and humans, from relief, from grief, from sadness and loneliness at my child’s independence. And, like too many nights of the past eight years, I wake, quietly weeping, from this dream that is always the same.

Waters is sitting on Cleo’s chest, nuzzling her nose, purring. Cleo’s cheeks are crusty from dried tears. She guesses that she’s been awake for two hours or so. She’s been lying on her back—motionless, eyes wide open—trying to forget the dream and the emotions it brings. The skylight above the bed reveals that dawn is breaking. She should get up, get started.

She stretches. It sends Waters leaping from her chest and out through the beaded curtain in the doorway. Cleo slides out of bed, two king-size futons laid side-by-side on the floor. She looks at her lovers in the diffused early-morning light: a domestic ritual that marks the beginning of her day.

Tall, graceful, long-legged Tamara, with her baby-pink skin, rosebud breasts, and long hair dyed in strands of different colours, has kicked off the sheet, lying on her back.

The hard curve of West’s shoulder peeks out from under the sheet he holds firmly under his armpit.

Assaad is sleeping on his stomach, his face buried in his pillow, his arm now stretched out over Cleo’s pillow, his perfectly manicured feet sticking out from the bed, as always.

And Patrice—gorgeous, broad-shouldered Patrice—isn’t back from work yet.

Patrice comes home from the night shift at The Small Easy to find Cleo yawning over the kitchen table, the night’s tears not yet washed away. He crouches and hugs her from behind.

“You look so tired, baby.” Cleo hears the smile in his quiet voice, the smile she’s always found so irresistible.

She turns and rubs her face against his chest. “I didn’t sleep well last night.”

Patrice kisses her on the forehead. “Then go back to bed. Let me make breakfast.” Again, that smile. She feels herself melting, almost going to sleep in his arms.

“But,” she says, yawning, “you’ve been cooking all night at the café. You should rest.”

He laughs and pats her butt. “I’ll be alright, Cleo. Allow me the pleasure of taking care of you, okay?”

She thinks, Can you make my dream go away? But she says nothing. She squeezes his hand, forces a smile, and leaves the kitchen.

For a few seconds, Cleo is confused, does not know where she is. Has she been sleeping? And then she remembers. This is the girls’ bedroom, the girls’ bed. The curtains are drawn, the door is ajar. What time is it?

She’d quietly snuck into the girls’ room after Patrice had come home, careful not to wake them. She’d crawled in between them and was calmed by their sweet, eight-year-old smells. She had only meant to lie down until Patrice called breakfast. Where were the girls now?

The kitchen is deserted and wiped clean. Indefatigable Patrice, again. No-one leaves a kitchen as spotless as he does. She looks at the clock: it’s nearly half past noon. She can’t remember the last time she slept in. Last night, the dream was more vivid than usual; it drained her.

Her mouth feels dry. She gets orange juice from the fridge and gulps it down. She wanders from room to room. She stops in the bathroom to splash her face.

The quiet is strange. She usually spends the morning and early afternoon tutoring the girls. West must be at the university, Assaad at The Smoke Shop. Patrice, she notices, is sleeping. Waters is curled up on the pillow next to his head. Where are the girls? And then she remembers: Tamara is back. She must have taken them out somewhere.

Just two days ago, Tamara returned from a six-month trip to Antarctica. She brought back photographs she’d taken of strange vegetation, species that paleobiologists claim have not grown for millions of years.

Cleo ends her tour of the house with Tamara’s office and is startled to see her sitting at her computer, fiddling with the photos from her trip. “Tam?”

“Clee, love, come.” Tamara, naked as she almost always is around the house, waves her over. Cleo is enchanted by her beauty, more so all the time. Cleo missed her while she was away.

Cleo settles in Tamara’s lap. Tamara is so tall that Cleo’s head only reaches up to her neck. Tamara’s poised nudity makes Cleo feel frumpy and unattractive, especially now that she notices the rumpled state of her own clothes, slept-in all morning. The feeling evaporates as Tamara squeezes her, digging her nose into Cleo’s neck, breathing her in. “I haven’t been back long enough to stop missing you, Clee. There were no other women on the expedition.” Tamara pulls off Cleo’s T-shirt, cups her sagging breasts. As always, Cleo is fascinated by the chiaroscuro of the soft pink of Tamara’s skin against her own dark brown. “They were like little boys, nervous at having their clubhouse invaded by a female, at having their secret handshakes revealed, protective of their toys.”

“Tam … Where are the girls?” How could Cleo have thought that Tamara had taken the girls out? Of all of them, Tamara was the least interested in the girls. She let them crawl all over her when they felt like it and was unfalteringly affectionate with them, but she never set aside time for them. She was vaguely uneasy with the idea of children.

“West took them to school. At breakfast, he talked about his lecture, to warm up. His class today is about the symbolic use of animals in politics. One of his case studies is about African elephants. You should have seen Njàbò! She got very excited and asked him tons of questions. She wanted to go hear West at school, and he thought it would be a treat for both of them. Especially seeing as how you seemed to need the sleep.”

“I can’t believe Sonya would be interested in that.”

Tamara runs her fingers through Cleo’s hair and says, “Doesn’t Sonya always do what Njàbò wants? Sometimes I think all of us are always doing what Njàbò wants. She’ll grow into a leader, that one. She’ll trample anyone in her path.”

Cleo is momentarily reminded of her dream, but she makes an effort to push it away. She jokes, “Wanna play hooky and go out for lunch? At The Small Easy?”

Eight years ago, Cleo gave birth to Njàbò. Most people thought that the girl looked like Patrice, especially because of her dark skin—like Patrice’s, darker than Cleo’s—but she could just as easily have been fathered by West or Assaad. The five of them had agreed not to do any tests to find out.

Assaad was Sonya’s biological father and her legal guardian. She’d been the daughter of their friends Karin and Pauline. Both women had died in a car accident the day after Njàbò was born. Sonya was three months older than Njàbò.

A few days later, a grey-brown cat jumped through the kitchen window while Patrice prepared breakfast. The cat drank water from a dirty bowl in the sink, and then refused to leave. The family adopted him and called him Waters.

At The Small Easy, while waiting for their order, Tamara goes to the washroom. A few seconds after she gets up, a man wearing a denim jacket materializes in her seat. One moment the seat is empty; the next, the man is there. Cleo is seized with a paralyzing fear. The man is short, almost like a child, but his face is that of an old man. His wrinkled skin is a washed-out greyish brown. He grabs both her hands in his. She feels his fingers, like vises, almost crushing the bones of her hands. “Do not fear your dreams. Do not fear Njàbò. You, too, are one of us, daughter. Believe in Njàbò. Follow her.” He vanishes as inexplicably as he appeared. Still numb with fear, all Cleo can focus on is how the old man hadn’t spoken in English, but in what she assumes must have been an African language. How had she understood him?

Tamara returns. Cleo says nothing about the old man.

When Cleo and Tamara come back from lunch, the girls are still out with West. There’s a message on the voicemail. He’s taking them out downtown; there’s a new Brazilian restaurant he’s curious about, and then they’ll go the Museum of Civilizations. He says he’ll pose in front of the paintings and sculptures and have the girls try to figure out his ancestry. His favourite joke.

When asked about his roots, West never gives the same answer. A mix of Cree and Russian? Hawaiian and Korean? Tibetan and Lebanese? He looks vaguely Asian, but his features don’t conform to any specific group. He loves to confuse people, to meddle with their expectations. His odd wit has always charmed Cleo.

Thinking of his easy silliness helps take the edge off her strange encounter at The Small Easy. Cleo takes this opportunity to give herself the day off from mothering and housekeeping.

She goes down to her sanctum. In the basement of their house, she’s set up a studio. There’s a small window high up on the wall, but she keeps it covered, lets no natural light in. She burns scented candles and incense. She’s comfortable painting only in the dim, flickering light, breathing in a rich blend of odours. Full, harsh light makes her feel exposed. The dim candlelight, the smoke, and the smells all contribute to a sense of being enveloped, of being in a cocoon, a womb, in a world where only she and her imagination exist. Sometimes, like today, she smokes a pipeful of hash, not only to relax but also to enrich the room’s aroma. Today, she needs to relax.

Had she hallucinated that man in the restaurant? She still remembers the feel of his rough hands against her smooth skin. His smell: like damp soil. How could he know about her secret dream?

She holds the smoke in her lungs as long as she can before blowing it out. She wants the hash to wash out her fears and anxieties. She wants to paint.

The hash is strong. She feels its effects within a few seconds, a soothing combination of numbness, purpose, and timelessness. She loses herself in the canvas.

She emerges from her drugged creative trance. Hours later? Minutes? It is darker: only a handful of candles still burn.

She goes to the sink and splashes her face with water. She forms a cup with her hands and drinks from it.

She lights a few fresh candles and returns to the canvas. She finds that she has painted a scene from her dream, one of the most violent moments. She had never before let herself depict such brutality. The giant elephant, who, in her dreams, is somehow her daughter Njàbò, is trampling humans beneath her enormous feet. She is throwing a mangled man in the air with her trunk. Cleo notices that she has painted words in the background, including “NJÀBÒ”—but also other strange words that she has never heard of before, such as “MÒKÌLÀ” and “MOKIDWA.”

“Why are you afraid of the dream?” Cleo is startled by this intrusion.

Njàbò?

Cleo turns, but her daughter doesn’t wait to hear the answer. Cleo hears her rush up the stairs and shut the door. Does she know that Cleo has no answer? Cleo isn’t surprised that Njàbò knows about her recurring dream. She’s scared, and what scares her most, somehow, is that lack of surprise.

It was Patrice who had known what “Njàbò” meant, but Cleo who named the baby. How had it come to her?

After the midwife had left, the whole family had slipped into bed with Cleo and the new baby. Cleo had immediately fallen asleep, exhausted from the long labour. She had slept deeply, had not remembered any dreams, but had woken knowing the baby’s name. “I think I want to call her Njàbò”—it was an odd-sounding word that meant nothing to her—“but I don’t know why.”

Patrice, who had been devastated by the elephant tragedy and had read many books to assuage his grief, recognized it. The last elephant, a female African forest elephant on a reserve in the Congo, had died nearly a year before Njàbò’s birth. Poaching, loss of habitat due to increasing human encroachment, spiteful slaughters in backlash against conservationists, and disease had finally taken their toll. All efforts at cloning had failed and were still failing.

“I know!” Patrice had said. “Njàbò … Njàbò is a mythical creature from Africa: the mother of all elephants. A giant with enormous tusks who appears whenever the elephants need a strong leader. All elephants gather around her when she calls. It’s a beautiful name. A strong name for our strong girl. I like it.” Everyone had agreed. Cleo had pushed aside the question of how the name had come to her. It was one of those unsolvable riddles best left alone.

Now, looking at the name on the canvas, she is more convinced than ever that she had never heard or seen the name before it mysteriously came to her eight years ago.

The dream now plagues Cleo nightly. She is always tired, never getting enough sleep, never fully rested.

She avoids Njàbò. She has begged off mothering. Tamara, Patrice, West, and Assaad now share the task. Cleo, after all, has taken on the bulk of that work for the past eight years, devoted her time and life to raising Njàbò and Sonya, to taking care of the house while the four of them pursued their careers. There had been that book with Tamara, five years ago, when the girls were three years old. The paintings, the shows, the tours. Of course, they say to Cleo, she should explore that aspect of her life again, let someone else take care of the house, the girls.

Tonight, the house is quiet. The whole family has gone for a walk in the park. It rained all day, and finally the cloud cover broke to give way to a warm evening. Cleo had agreed to go, but decided against it at the last minute. Assaad, especially, insisted that she come along, to spend time with the family. But in the end she’d stayed alone in the house. Well, not quite alone.

Waters follows her as she walks into the living room. She takes down a big art book from a shelf built into the wall. Cleo sits on the floor; Waters sits in front of her, purring and rubbing his head on her knee. She opens the book at random and remembers.

The book, The Absence of Elephants, was a worldwide success. Trying to exorcise her dream, which she never talked about, Cleo had created a series of elephant paintings. Some were scenes from her dreams, but not all. She had used no photographic references. The results ranged from photorealism to evocative abstractions. She painted in the evenings when the girls were in bed, asleep. The whole family was extremely excited about her paintings. Patrice and Njàbò, especially, spent hours looking at them, but it was Tamara who had been inspired by them.

Tamara had sold her publisher on the idea: an art book combining Cleo’s paintings with photos of forests and plains where elephants used to thrive, of human constructions that now stood in areas that were once habitats for elephants. There would be no words: the pictures, especially in the wake of the global desolation over the extinction of the elephants, would speak in all languages, allowing the book to be marketed worldwide without the cost of translation. Tamara would go to Africa, India, and anywhere else where any elephants—even woolly mammoths—had once lived, hunting with her camera the ghosts of the dead creatures.

The Absence of Elephants led to gallery bookings. Cleo’s paintings, along with Tamara’s photographs, were hung in cities all over the world, from Buenos Aires and Montreal to Glasgow and Sydney … but not in India, where the book was too hot politically. The two women had gone on tour with their work—wine, food, and five-star hotels all expensed. It had been a glamorous, exciting experience for Cleo—and it had forged a complicit bond between the two women. Before then, Cleo had often been intimidated by the beautiful Tamara’s fashionable elegance.

The book, the sales of paintings and signed, numbered prints of Tamara’s photos, the DVD-ROM, the web rights, and the CGI Imax film had made the family not quite wealthy, but certainly at ease.

West took a sabbatical from the university and looked after the house and the children. After nearly a year of book tours, art galleries, and media appearances, Cleo missed Njàbò and Sonya, yearned to return to domestic life. She came back home, to the girls. For the next few years, she rarely painted. But the dream continued to haunt her.

Cleo now spends entire days in her studio, has even taken to locking herself in. Sometimes she stands silently behind the door, listening to the others talk about her. They assume that she has been overtaken by a new creative storm, is painting a new series, and needs time alone to focus her creative energies.

In truth, Cleo’s days disappear in a cloud of hash. She hides from her fears: of Njàbò, of what she would paint if she were to take up the brush, of being in public, vulnerable to the appearance of the wrinkled old man.

The first thing Cleo thinks is: Patrice and Assaad look so uncomfortable sleeping on that small ugly couch. Patrice is lying on top of Assaad, resting his head on Assaad’s shoulder. Assaad’s arms are wrapped around Patrice, one hand on the small of his back, the other on his shoulder blade. “Patty? Assaad?” The two men snap awake. And then Cleo peers around the room, touching the mattress beneath her. She thinks: Is this a hospital bed?

Cleo notices that Patrice looks worried, but she can’t read Assaad, whose face is even more inscrutable than usual. Getting up, the men stand on either side of Cleo, each wrapping one of her hands in their own. Cleo takes her hands back before they can say anything. “Enough. This is too much. Go sit down. What am I doing here?”

They go back to the couch. Assaad squeezes Patrice’s hand, nodding at him to speak. “No, love, you tell her.” Patrice says. “You found her.”

Assaad looks straight into Cleo’s eyes, willing her to keep her eyes locked on his. His voice is dry ice, fuming with wisps of cold mist. “None of us had seen you for more than a day. For weeks, you’ve been distant, aloof, oblivious to the girls, oblivious to all of us.”

Cleo’s muscles tighten up, in a reflexive effort to protect herself. She’s never heard Assaad speak in such a cold, hard voice before.

“We thought you were working on a new series. You let us believe that.”

Assaad pauses, his eyes still locked on Cleo’s. Is he waiting for an explanation? Or a reaction? Cleo wants to look away, but can’t.

“As I said, we hadn’t seen you for more than a day. You hadn’t come to bed the night before. You’d locked yourself in your studio. The girls and I were ready to have lunch. I knocked on your door, calling you, inviting you to eat with us. You didn’t answer. I knocked harder. Yelled out your name. Still, you didn’t answer. I had to take the door out. I found you unconscious. The air was foul. You’d pissed yourself. Vomited.”

Again, a pause. Cleo feels the cold mist of Assaad’s anger go down her throat, into her stomach. Of all of them, he is the most patient, the most understanding, the one who resolves conflicts, soothes hurts and pains. How could she have let it come to this?

“There was but one new painting. Later, Njàbò told us you’d painted that one weeks ago, the day West brought them to his class. I called the ambulance. I couldn’t rouse you.”

Another pause. Patrice fills the tense silence. “The doctor told us you were suffering from dehydration and malnutrition. Why haven’t you been eating? What have you been doing? Are you angry with us? Speak to us, Clee, we all love you. Maybe we should have been more attentive. You were looking weak, tired. We should have paid attention. We were all too preoccupied, with work and with the girls. Why are you hiding from us? What are you hiding from us?” Patrice’s voice gets louder and increasingly reproachful. “Why did you let this happen?”

“Patty, I…” She avoids their faces. She feels ashamed. Why has she kept the dream a secret all these years? The dream is a chasm into which intimacy is falling ever further from her grasp. Can it reemerge from those depths after so many years of secrecy? “How … How are the girls?”

“They’re fine, Clee. Assaad quit his job at The Smoke Shop. He’s a great mother.” Patrice’s grin fills his whole face. He ruffles Assaad’s hair, kissing him on the cheek. Assaad fights a losing battle against the grin spreading on his face. “We didn’t really need the money. It’s a stimulating change to be at home with the girls. It’s a challenge to teach them, and to learn from them.”

“Who’s taking ca—”

Assaad answers, “They’re with West today. He took them to see the new Katgirl & Canary movie that they’ve both been so excited about.”

“How long have I been here?”

Patrice glances at Assaad, then gets up and sits next to her on the bed, stroking her face. “You’ve been out for four days. It’s Sunday.”

Cleo closes her eyes. She wishes she knew why she’s been so apprehensive, why she’s been hiding a part of herself from her lovers. She remembers falling in love with Patrice when she was still waiting tables at The Small Easy. She remembers him introducing her to his family—Assaad, Tamara, West; her family, now. She takes a blind leap. “I’ve been having this dream…”

The Baka—the few hundred who remain—live in the forest, in a territory that covers part of Cameroon and the Congo. They believe—or believed, Cleo isn’t sure—that the Mòkìlà were a tribe of shapeshifters, both elephant and human. The Mòkìlà would raid Baka villages and initiate the captives into their secret society. Their sorcerers, the mokidwa, would transform their captives into shapeshifters. The captives became Mòkìlà and were never again seen by their families.

The mokidwa could take on the form of any animal. They also knew the secret of invisibility.

Njàbò is the ancestor of all elephants, sometimes male, sometimes female. Stories abound of avatars of Njàbò, giant cows or bulls, leading herds of elephants against Baka warriors or villages. Njàbò’s tusks are so enormous, they contain ten other tusks within them. Njàbò is often flanked by a retinue of guards.

Cleo has been trying to demystify her experiences. She searched the web for those strange words on her painting and found them. She asked West to get books from the university library. She’s been reading about the Baka and the myth of Njàbò. She’s never cared before about her ancestry and now finds herself wondering if perhaps there are Baka or Mòkìlà among her ancestors. The Mòkìlà are a myth, she reminds herself.

She’s been painting again. The new canvasses are violent, raw. When she painted her first series years ago, she hadn’t felt this uninhibited. Now, every session leaves her exhausted, yet exhilarated. Having shared her dream with her family, she has nothing to hide. She feels free.

She still dreams every night, but the dream is changing. Now the whole family walks with Njàbò. And the dream is getting longer. There is more violence, more bloodshed. Njàbò leads the tribe around the world. They crush all human constructions. They kill all the humans. Theirs is an unstoppable stampede. Cleo has painted much of this. Now, the dream continues beyond the violence. The tribe walks the Earth in peace. The tribe grows and Njàbò reigns. Today, for the first time, Cleo’s painting is inspired by that part of the dream.

The others tell her that they, too, have started dreaming of Njàbò, the elephant.

She leaves her door open; sometimes the others come down and watch her work, quietly, discreetly. At first, she knew, they were keeping an eye on her, worried that she would withdraw once again. After a few weeks, that changed. Now they come down because they find it exciting to be in the room while Cleo paints. The candlelight, the thick odours, and her absolute devotion to the canvas all combine to create a mesmerizing ambience. Even Waters has been spending hours curled up under her stool.

Every day, Njàbò comes, silently, to see her paint. Cleo is still nervous around her daughter, still avoids talking with her. Cleo senses that Njàbò is in the room now. The painting is finished. It depicts Njàbò, the elephant, towering over her herd, young elephants running around her, playing, celebrating. Around the elephants, the forest is lush.

Njàbò, the eight-year-old girl, walks up to her mother, in silence. She gazes at the painting. Cleo sees the tears running down her daughter’s cheeks. Cleo gathers Njàbò in her lap. The girl buries her head in her mother’s breasts. They both cry. Cleo can’t remember crying with such abandon, feeling so cleansed by the act. She hugs her daughter, firmly, proudly.

I am awakened by a light kiss on the mouth. Njàbò has crawled into bed, is holding my hand. Sonya is behind her, quiet, submissive. Njàbò whispers, “I am the dream.”

Njàbò rouses the entire family, kissing them one by one: Patrice, West, Assaad, and, finally, Tamara. She whispers lovingly to each of them, her lips brushing their ears.

She leads the family outside. The street is deserted in the middle of the night. Njàbò turns to face us all together. We are all naked.

Looking straight into my eyes, Waters rubs himself against Njàbò’s leg. Behind my daughter, a group of old men materializes. The mokidwa have shed their invisibility.

Njàbò smiles. Soon, the ground will tremble.

END

Njàbò was originally published in On Spec Vol. 15, no. 3 and is copyright Claude Lalumière, 2003.

This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library.

You can support GlitterShip by checking out our Patreon at patreon.com/keffy, subscribing to our feed, or by leaving reviews on iTunes.

Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back soon with a GlitterShip original.

Not in its individual parts, but as a whole. It covers everything, smothers everything. It blows continents open with opportunity. Much of that opportunity is for death, for carcasses hung up and split open in massive consumption, a grind of bone and blood, but for some the opportunity is a tool for all that. Something to insert into the space between ribs, to lever open and dissect.

Not everyone dies in war. Not everyone sinks into blank nothingness, into unmarked graves and mass burials, into fields turned red and mud that stinks of iron. Some fight with symbols instead of flesh, their weapons heady and hidden, and it is in combination and in permutation that Turing finds his battleground.

[Full transcript after the cut.]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 55 for May 5, 2018. This is your host Keffy and I’m super excited to be sharing this story with you today.

Before we get started, I want to let you know that GlitterShip is now part of the Audible afflilate program. What this means is that just by listening to GlitterShip, you are eligible to get a free audio book and 30 day trial at Audible to check out the service.

If you’re looking for a great book with queer characters, I recommend checking out Amatka by Karin Tidbeck. Amatka is set on a colony world in which objects can only maintain their shape if they are properly named. While visiting a colony not her own, Vanja discovers truths that alter the way she thinks about the world forever.

To download a free audiobook today, go to http://www.audibletrial.com/GlitterShip and choose an excellent book to listen to, whether that’s Amatka or something else entirely.

On to the episode, we have one original story and a poem for you today.

The poem is “Telegram From Tomorrow’s Lovelorn” by Shannon Lippert.

Shannon Lippert is a reluctant New Yorker, a former professional
Internet surfer, and a performing artist. She writes plays, essays, poems,
short fiction, long fiction, bad fiction, and fanfiction.

Telegram From Tomorrow’s Lovelorn

By Shannon Lippert

oh how good it is to be alive in a time
without miscommunication, we have so many
tools for reconciliation, we are inclined to be happy
with our upward trajectory—the next tool to be improved upon
is love

we have experimented with procedures and
policies that calculate for irregulars and
deviations in nature, and designed a program
suitable for all kinds, in the future we will not worry about
a thing

the remarkable innovation of the essential human
experience is made possible by contributions
made by companies you’ve never heard of
with wealth you’ve never dreamed of, for the creation of lovers
to be

no more the messy business of
hiring a writer for your profile or
interviewing for the position of life-partner
you will be intuited, distilled,
contained STOP

in the future love will be sleeker
an organic machine of orgasmic proportions
conducted by an algorithm calibrated to destiny
the beta version has been intriguing, and produced an
object

an artifact of more visceral traditions, tomorrow
there will be no more incompatibility, no more
irreconcilable differences, for all will be reconciled
categorized, tagged, compartmentalized, converted
to data

this is virtually reality, with a few minor upgrades
the bugs reported and removed, like
the hair between one’s brows, or the
men with low testosterone, the women who are too
driven

unnecessary inclinations will be resolved in the future, with
equations installed in a binary system of zeroes and ones
the problem is not one of variables, but imbalance, which
drove the initiative towards simpler paradigms of
passion STOP

reducing the complexity has caused initial disturbances
but overall the product has been well-received by
focus groups, carefully selected, who long for a time
when lonely is no longer something one has to
be

it is a wonder the species was able to replicate
at all, with the mire of mundane relations
and deeply confusing infatuations, and now
our relief is in the last stage of development, to learn the art of
loving STOP

we will have models that are easy to duplicate, simple
to impose on any group or subgroup, our
assets determined not by unquantifiable inherent
value, but by the concrete fact of what we need to
be

to other people, to those that assess us
like the auditors of old, only for fate
we can now be evaluated for attractive features
more easily, leaving more time to construct our true
love

Our original short story for this episode is “The Huntsman’s Sequence” by Octavia Cade.

Octavia Cade is a New Zealand writer with a PhD in science
communication, who particularly enjoys writing stories about science
history. She’s currently working on a collection of short fantasy stories
set at Bletchley Park during WW2; “The Huntsman’s Sequence” is one
of these. Her work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, and
Shimmer, amongst others. She attended Clarion West 2016.

Our guest reader is Jacob Budenz.

Jacob Budenz is a writer and multi-disciplinary performer whose work has been published by Assaracus, Hinchas de Poesia, Polychrome Ink, The Avenue, and more. Currently, Jacob resides in New Orleans in pursuit of an MFA in Creative Writing.

Content warning for mention of suicide and dysphoria.

The Huntsman’s Sequence

by Octavia Cade

01011011101111….

m-configuration: Knife

The war is blank.

Not in its individual parts, but as a whole. It covers everything, smothers everything. It blows continents open with opportunity. Much of that opportunity is for death, for carcasses hung up and split open in massive consumption, a grind of bone and blood, but for some the opportunity is a tool for all that. Something to insert into the space between ribs, to lever open and dissect.

Not everyone dies in war. Not everyone sinks into blank nothingness, into unmarked graves and mass burials, into fields turned red and mud that stinks of iron. Some fight with symbols instead of flesh, their weapons heady and hidden, and it is in combination and in permutation that Turing finds his battleground.

He’s under no illusion that it keeps his hands clean. The information he extracts from the body of Enigma, the sweet little Snow White of his waking dreams, is used for murder as much as if he did the stabbing himself.

He can live with that, because he has the skills and it is a necessary thing, what he has become. The war, when he holds it, is sharp and bright and clean-surfaced and he knows his role, knows what it makes him.

For Turing the war is a knife that cuts him off from the old life; that sutures him into the new. He uses it to make little holes in his skin; to lace up the flesh again in new configurations, for the open theater of conflict comes with orders and betrayal. Academia was exploration, but what he does at Bletchley comes with focus, with tracking down and opening up. He cuts through code as if it was wild boar, slices out the heart of it, the liver and lungs, and offers the organs up to others.

He is the Hunstman.

new m-configuration: Huntsman

m-configuration: Huntsman

The huntsman is 1.

Turing is solid in himself, upright. Not simply in a physical way, though he is proud of his body. A runner’s body, swift and sure and when he runs of a morning, he is certain of his steps for he counts each one, catalogues the variation and speed and distance. There is little fat on him. He is smooth and straight and lean.

This is the shape he admires in others. A man’s shape, like his own, and he is not ashamed of where his desires lead him.

A huntsman is built for the chase. He has stamina, and strength. He has the determination to follow through mud and thorn thickets and shell holes, through bureaucracy and ill weather. He has patience, too, for there are times a huntsman has to stay downwind, to wait and wonder and make his best guess as to where the prey is hiding.

The huntsman is an analyst. He is able to follow the bare pattern of footprints, covered over as they are by leaves and leavings to pick out the true trail amidst the false. There are many false trails. They’re left to confuse him, to put him off the scent. It’s hard to pick out one pattern among many when the letters are sneaking by, in such numbers that the ones he wants are camouflaged by the rest.

It takes an analyst to butcher, too. The huntsman’s job isn’t over with the hunt: he must string up and dissect, pull out the organs for inspection and passing over.

He must have the scent of blood.

new m-configuration: Huntsman

m-configuration: Huntsman

The huntsman is 0.

The queen is the loveliest figure the huntsman has ever seen. He feels that he is nothing in her presence.

Will you give me your allegiance? she says.

She is built of abaci and cogwheels and calculation. She is built of logic and syllogism, axiom and tautology. Turing can see numbers in her hair and her dress is embroidered over with computation.

He does not worship her as if she were a woman, for women he finds difficult. They are expectations he cannot fulfil. He worships the queen as if she were an ideal: mathematics come to life, and that life does not expect him to lie with her.

He’d rather lie with men anyway.

The queen knows and does not care. You are what you are, she says. Why deny it?

She is all objectivity and questions.

Am I not beautiful? she says, head cocked to one side with cool assessment. Could you make me more beautiful?

It’s not as if truth needs decoration to shine. Still, Turing thinks he sees a path forward, and that path lies in mechanism, in the potential for engines and computing. He is the huntsman, and he knows the value of haste, of not letting a trail go cold. The queen chews equations slowly, with slide rules and logarithmic tables. He thinks he could make her work faster, more accurately.

You are already the most beautiful, he says. But it’s not like you couldn’t stand a few improvements.

His social skills have never been a strong point, but the queen is not insulted by accuracy.

I will give you my allegiance, he says, as if she’d never had it already as he worked through his arithmetic exercises as a lad, as he studied logic and looked in mirrors and recognized himself for what he was.

The queen is satisfied.

new m-configuration: Queen

m-configuration: Queen

The queen is 0.

The queen is 1.

She sees in black and white. A binary code, and even her mirror lacks color for color comes in degrees and all that the queen can see is certainty.

The mirror shows her troop movements and casualty lists. They are in black and white for dead is “not alive” and alive is “not dead” and these are the switches she has. Injuries are the same. Her soldiers are “fixable” or “not”, where “fixable” means “able to be returned to the front”.

There is an increasing proportion of “not”.

The fronts too are binary things, for all they change on their many border. This town is ours, that ridge is theirs. She has no room to wish them shaded with pink or lavender or violet. Dreams are a distraction, and wishing for victory will not make it so. Better the queen looks the whole horrid situation in the face, clearly assesses her chances.

Mirror mirror, she says, and it’s no surprise to hear that Enigma is prettier than she is. Younger, smoother, more efficient in her workings. No surprise there, they’re related enough for beauty to cross over, based as they both are in numbers and logic. It’s a family thing.

Nothing the queen does can crack that lovely surface, and with every failure, with every not-success the casualty lists become larger, the fronts closer.

She sees projections and possibilities, feels the mirror start to tremble with strain for it’s hard to show truth without color and that’s what the queen is: truth. How can she be truthful without certainty?

The truth is that the war will be won or it will be lost. It is not a pleasant truth but the queen is unconcerned with pleasantry. She’s always preferred surety to manners.

What are you certain of? she says to her reflection, and it’s less a question than a means of building up. A foundation for future plans.

You are certain that you are pretty, she says.

You are certain that Snow White is prettier.

There’s a viable argument in there, one that rests on removal.

new m-configuration: Queen

m-configuration: Queen

The queen is blank.

In another world, another story, the queen would look into a mirror and her frustrations would come out in anger, in wrinkled hatred and the end of blooming, and these things together would wash out her reason and leave her mind a mirror of continents: breaking up into little pieces in preparation for war.

In this world, the world where war is no longer a thing of plans and dark dreams and potentiality, rage is self-indulgent. Victory requires reason, the cool and easy flow of numbers, and there is no room for anything but rationality and the stepped resolutions of engineers and mathematicians.

(Control may be the only thing the two queens ever shared; the mirror that binds them together.)

In this world, the queen must speak truth and that truth is objective and binding.

“If we do not break Enigma, we will fail,” she says.

Turing watches her speak her truth every morning in the mirror. It is a truth he knows in his bones and his water, in his cheekbones, in his fingertips.

A queen should be that way. Regal, with nothing of the lie about her.

“If we do not break Enigma, we will fail,” she says.

(“If you do not kill Snow White, I will fall,” she says.)

Enigma is the focus of his days. Turing pictures her sometimes, the way she’s snuck up on him with her perfect complexity, with the smooth supple shape of her code. Never has he seen such a perfect encryption. He’d like to pin her under glass, to keep her still and silent and spread out for observation, but she’s too much of a living thing to lie quietly.

new m-configuration: Snow White

m-configuration: Snow White

Snow White is x.

She marks the spot.

Enigma is information. She is dates and coordinates. She is rotors and contact points and letter routes, and she cannot be decrypted until her position is known. She is shiny keys and crossed wires and combinations that can be remade over and over. She is sleek and slinking and beautiful and she shines bright enough to hide the truth.

Where is Snow White? says the queen, when the organs on her plate are shown to have come from other encryptions. Snow White is the threat, the unbreakable one.

Enigma is in the castle, in the woods, in the cottage, in the coffin. Her positions are different each time the queen looks for her.

Snow White romps over the countryside, cleaning up for the men who employ her, washing out submarines and rinsing out battalions, hanging them up to dry. She is sweeping airfields off the map.

She is very hard to catch.

Messages spill over the queen’s plate, and all of them are inedible. Tainted by combination, watered down with alphabet and permutation. The queen can’t chew fast enough to eat her way through to the marrow of them, and the truth of the messages is hidden from her.

But the queen has a huntsman, and she is chewing faster and faster.

new m-configuration: Queen

m-configuration: Snow White

Snow White is ǝ.

She is a placeholder, essentially. The point in the story tape that indicates beginnings.

It’s beginnings that illustrate again for Turing the difference between knowledge and truth. Some confuse them, but he never has. Snow White is a story of beginnings: of conception and transmission, of birth and ciphers and familial betrayal, the crossing of borders and what it’s like to run and hide against an enemy too strong to fight.

She’s a need for science, is Snow White, for poison antidotes and the exact number of kisses necessary to break the spell and open up glass and lungs, to start the heart beating again in the resistance. That too is a beginning, for waking comes with new rules and allied forces, with ambush and undermining and troop movements, the silencing of submarines as well as confetti and the roasted meats of feasting time.

She’s pure numbers, is Snow White. They make up her spirit and her bones and the typewriter casing of her flesh, but as Turing tries to tease meaning from her blood he is certain in his own warm marrow that there are only two endings to her beginning.

In one, Enigma sleeps in her coffin and never wakes, and there is blood and blackened hulls in the water, an island overcome.

In the other, the Huntsman learns enough from the red evisceration of her organs to be able to satisfy the queen.

Turing knows the ending will be one of these. He knows also that there is only one he is prepared to tolerate. He’ll see to it that Enigma has a happy ending.
Because happy endings might not be truth but they’re a type of knowing too, and one he’s pinned his hopes on.

new m-configuration: Apple

m-configuration: Snow White

Snow White is blank.

In this she reminds him of war and knives, though it’s a knife that brought Enigma to life, it’s an apple that ends her. There is such a range of possibilities in her, spread out and spread open. Thousands of permutations, millions of them, and they are all packed so close together that the mass becomes a single body, smooth and inviolate.

The trouble is that Turing was brought in to violate, the huntsman tracking down, snatching skin and code from the airwaves and carving it up for queen and country. He can’t regret his post. Enigma is clean and lovely and he admires the way she moves, the kinetic precision of her, the way she skips and teases.

He is confounded by her. Fascinated, and if a huntsman has dogs to bring to bay he too has beasts that growl and bite, and these are made of metal. Bletchley is full of machines, their colossal presence a bulwark and barking behind him, ready to gobble. Turing feeds Snow White to them in thin pieces, in tiny paper strips and she’s opened up before him, her blankness taking brief form and breaking up again.

He doesn’t begrudge the girl her figure. Not even that it’s always changing. The variation keeps him interested; it’s more than any other woman’s ever been able to manage.

But Snow White isn’t any other woman. She’s perfect, siren-voiced and something to come back to again and again. Though Turing knows he has to open her up, has to pin her down to pin meaning to that fascinating blankness, there’s part of him that’s glad for knives.

It’s such an opportunity they’ve given him, to put Enigma in her coffin.

new m-configuration: Snow White

m-configuration: Apple

The apple is 0.

The apple is 1.

The apple is x.

The apple is ǝ.

The apple is any number of bloody things.

If there’s one thing his work at Bletchley has given Turing, it is knowledge. More than that, it’s the knowledge that what he knows is frequently useless.

It’s a discouraging realization.

This is a list of what he knows:

Turing knows that he has cracked Enigma. He sees her in his dreams sometimes, code come to life in a perfect construct of flesh and glass, black and red and white and delicate as snowflakes. And it’s such a satisfaction, he doesn’t deny it, and a relief to know that for all this hideous war has cut his country to ribbons he has helped to settle it, to blunt the sharp edges and turn them away from others, from himself.

He knows constriction. Not just the pressure of routine and isolation and the need for silence, but that which comes from silence extended. For when the war is over and his work has been buried under official acts and promises, he knows limitation and what it is to bite his tongue until the bites never heal.

And he knows, above all else, what it is to be lonely. Bletchley is full of people and there’s always the sense of them massing at his borders but he finds it difficult to reach over. This is especially so when these people begin to spill out of manor grounds, to go home and on and he is left with all the connections he never could make, quite. The connections he most wants, those that come with firm warm flesh and hardness moving over him… well.

There is black bile within him, red teeth, the white of lips bitten down, and Turing comes to understand that, after all, knowledge can be poison as well as panacea.

He knows what it is to be betrayed.

He knows what apples taste like.

new m-configuration: Apple

m-configuration: Apple

The apple is blank.

The apple is bright and sweet and carries the promise of nothing; of gaps and absence and the thought of these is a restful one.

(Lately rest seems very appealing.)

Turing knows what permutation is—knows it in his flesh, softer now than it used to be with his runner’s body ruined by estrogen, the chemical castration that has given him breasts.

Snow White has breasts, no matter how much old Walt tried to cover them up. Turing would like to think a prince would come for him, wake him from this drugged state and break him out of the glass coffin of expected behavior but he is—has always been—the queen’s man and he knows he is not Snow White.

Snow White was sealed away behind glass and put on display. She has always been Enigma for him: something to be manipulated and spread out, to be opened up for silent viewing.

The apple did for both of them. Knowledge is half the time a poisoned fruit, and for all it can break a code into pieces it can break other things as well. His permutation is not nearly so subtle; it doesn’t have the camouflage of mathematics and he’s never been good at lies. Never seen the value in them.

Poison seems to be the only possible solution. Simple enough to track down and Turing has made a career of tracking, of long-distance pursuit.

He dips the apple in cyanide, a parody of the Evil Queen because truth is confused so often with knowledge and when he looks in mirrors they stand behind him, these so-close permutations and he’s the only one to tell difference between them.

The apple is bright and sweet.

He is the Huntsman.

He is the Huntsman.

new m-configuration: Huntsman

END

“The Huntsman’s Sequence” is a GlitterShip original and is copyright Octavia Cade, 2018.

“Telegram From Tomorrow’s Lovelorn” is a GlitterShip original and is copyright Shannon Lippert 2018.

This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library.

You can support GlitterShip by checking out our Patreon at patreon.com/keffy, subscribing to our feed, or by leaving reviews on iTunes.

Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back soon with a reprint of Njàbò by Claude Lalumière.

Up along the edge of the ridge, Gordon could see them gathering. The mass of bugs formed a ragged silhouette against the hazy lavender sky. Each critter stood only ankle-high—about as big as a yappy dog—six-legged, like ants, with azure exoskeletons hard as crash helmets. Individually they posed little threat, but if only a few of them spooked, panic could ripple through the herd, bringing all thirty thousand of them swarming down.

The stampede could crush him and Paint flat.

From his position at the bottom of the crater, Gordon gave a long chirping whistle. Amplified by his hardsuit’s external speaker, the trill echoed through the crater. Gordon imagined it lifting up through the thin atmosphere to reach the three rings that encircled New Saturn. Here, near the equator, the rings bisected the sky in a thin, glittering band, shining apricot and peach, reflecting the light of the G-class star that shone down on him.

A few of the bugs—called microbe-seeding terrestrial injectors or MSTIs, by the terraforming corporations that had genetically engineered them—turned their attention toward Gordon at the sound, but still hesitated. The bugs were naturally fearful of new territory, preferring to follow the scent trails previously laid down by other bugs.

Gordon had loaded new scent into Paint’s dispersal unit before riding down into the crater, so he knew a perfectly good trail existed. The bugs should be following him to the center of the crater, where Gordon had spread a banquet of feed—so many white pellets they almost obscured the fine pink sand.

[Full transcript after the cut]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 54 for April 10, 2018. This is your host Keffy, and I’m super excited to be sharing this story with you.

After a long wait, the Autumn 2017/Winter 2018 issue is now available, and you can purchase that at www.glittership.com/buy or via some of your favorite ebook sellers.

Our story today is a reprint by Nicole Kimberling, “Oh, Give Me A Home,” read by Dave Liloia.

Nicole Kimberling is a novelist and the senior editor at Blind Eye Books. Her first novel, Turnskin, won the Lambda Literary Award. Other works include the Bellingham Mystery Series, set in the Washington town where she resides with her wife of thirty years. She is also the creator and writer of “Lauren Proves Magic is Real!” a serial fiction podcast, which explores the lesser case files of Special Agent Keith Curry, supernatural food inspector.

Dave Liloia is a voice actor and narrator from Seattle, WA. He co-hosts both the Warp Drives podcast with his wife TJ and Rat Hole podcast. His day job is to move electrons. You can find him on Twitter @warpdrives.

Oh, Give Me A Home

By Nicole Kimberling

Up along the edge of the ridge, Gordon could see them gathering. The mass of bugs formed a ragged silhouette against the hazy lavender sky. Each critter stood only ankle-high—about as big as a yappy dog—six-legged, like ants, with azure exoskeletons hard as crash helmets. Individually they posed little threat, but if only a few of them spooked, panic could ripple through the herd, bringing all thirty thousand of them swarming down.

The stampede could crush him and Paint flat.

From his position at the bottom of the crater, Gordon gave a long chirping whistle. Amplified by his hardsuit’s external speaker, the trill echoed through the crater. Gordon imagined it lifting up through the thin atmosphere to reach the three rings that encircled New Saturn. Here, near the equator, the rings bisected the sky in a thin, glittering band, shining apricot and peach, reflecting the light of the G-class star that shone down on him.

A few of the bugs—called microbe-seeding terrestrial injectors or MSTIs, by the terraforming corporations that had genetically engineered them—turned their attention toward Gordon at the sound, but still hesitated. The bugs were naturally fearful of new territory, preferring to follow the scent trails previously laid down by other bugs.

Gordon had loaded new scent into Paint’s dispersal unit before riding down into the crater, so he knew a perfectly good trail existed. The bugs should be following him to the center of the crater, where Gordon had spread a banquet of feed—so many white pellets they almost obscured the fine pink sand.

“Not great,” Gordon’ replied. “We’ve got a bunch of shy Shirleys at the front of the column when what we really need is a couple of bouncy bold Bonnies to start moving down the trail.”

Though learning the personality of every bug would have been impossible, Gordon had broken the herd down into a few basic temperaments. Shirleys were the workhorses of the MSTIs, processing feed quickly and more efficiently than any other type. But they were also the most recalcitrant. The Bonnies showed distinct initiative and curiosity, behaving as scouts. They also got lost a lot. If Gordon had to negotiate some rocky ledge at a suicidal angle during a sandstorm, nine out of ten times it was because a Bonnie had gotten herself into a jam. A few other personality types had emerged in this, the first-ever free-range experiment: lusty Leroys, deceptive Daisys, lazy Lorraines. But there was only one Queen Elvira. She stayed in the enclosure at their homestead, laying eggs.

“Did you try a whistle?”

“Of course I tried a whistle,” Gordon said. “I did ‘Turkey in the Straw.’”

“I’m almost at the lip of the crater now. I’ll swing around and see if I can get them going from the back.”

“Roger that,” Gordon said.

Lifting his head to scan the crater’s rim Gordon spotted Henry mounted on his excursion vehicle, which he called Bucephalus, after Alexander the Great’s horse. In truth, neither Paint nor Bucephalus resembled horses so much as long-legged spiders, but a dearth of positive musical or historical arachnid names had naturally led them to choose equine names for the robotic transport vehicles.

Gordon raised his hand, and Henry returned the gesture. The sunlight glinted off the arm of his blue hardsuit. Henry pressed the MSTIs from the flank, urging them forward. Still they balked till the jostling from the back pushed one over the edge. Instinctively the MSTI rolled into a tight ball. Another tipped over the edge and another till a steady stream of bugs rolled toward Gordon.

Being given to spontaneous musicality, Gordon began to sing:

See them tumbling down

Pledging their love to the ground

Dusty but free I’ll be found

Drifting along with the tumbling MSTIs

I’m a rovin’ cowboy ridin’ all day long

MSTIs around me sing their lonely song

Nights beneath New Saturn’s Rings

I’ll ride along and tunes I will sing

“Nice one, Gordy,” Henry said. Sitting astride his vehicle, encased in a hardsuit that could barely contain his muscle, Henry was hale and hearty as any old-time terraformer or wildcatter sent from a mining company.

Gordon couldn’t be more different. Having been born and raised in space, he’d simply never developed the muscle or bone to cope with the daily terrestrial struggle against gravity.

When they’d first started courting, Gordon had gone to great lengths to never fully remove that armature—not even when they were in orbit at the Free Station 19, where the pull of gravity wouldn’t cripple him. He felt sickly against Henry’s strappy, Earth-bred muscles and thick, sturdy bones.

But Henry’s three-pronged strategy of sincerity, sweetness, and song had eventually gotten him inside the hardsuit long enough to get a ring on Gordon’s finger. A homestead had followed soon after. Now they ran the only free-ranging herd of MSTIs across ten thousand acres of barren soil for Homesteads for Humanity Interstellar. They’d completed three years of a five-year contract. The MSTIs were part of the second phase of terraforming. Their job was to masticate and defecate, enriching the soil with microbes crucial to farming Earth-style plants. Once the soil was ready, he and Henry spread spores of beneficial fungus. Then, after the fruiting bodies emerged, their work was done. He and Henry would mosey along to the next homestead, leaving the land for the first-generation farmers. They would bring their pressurized greenhouses and be the true pioneers here on New Saturn.

In a previous life, Gordon had worked for Vanguard Commercial Terraforming as an animal wrangler and vet tech. After culling thousands of bugs that could have been useful given even the tiniest amount of medical attention, he decided to trade his fat paycheck for the grand experiment run by Homesteads.

By the time Henry reached him, the first wave of MSTIs had finished their spherical descent and were beginning to unroll and tuck into the chow.

Or most of them were.

A couple of lusty Leroys who’d landed by each other had decided to hump instead.

“They’re at it again,” Henry remarked. “You’d think they’d go after a Shirley.”

“You should make a note of it in your log,” Henry said. “And get a VR image for documentation.”

“Yes, professor.” He did, though he couldn’t help feeling slightly perverted taking the time to film the luscious Leroy love.

Henry leaned forward on Bucephalus, scanning the far horizon while the MSTIs crunched and munched around the robot’s legs. Now and then one paused to squat and leave that shining pellet of pure biological enrichment. Being a hardware man, Henry wasn’t as prone to anthropomorphizing the MSTIs as Gordon. Instead he felt a strong attachment to the machines that kept Gordon ambulatory and kept them both alive in this prehuman environment.

After he’d finished the VR capture, Gordon glanced up to see Henry still scrutinizing the horizon.

“What are you seeing?” Gordon asked.

“A blip at the lip of the crater.” Henry squinted, reading the display projected on the inside of his faceplate. “Heading southeast.”

“One of the Bonnies again?” Gordon swung around to scan for a signal. Sure enough, a lone MSTI had left the herd.

“I imagine so.” Henry turned to face him. Through the visor Gordon could see fatigue setting in—mainly at the corners of his full mouth, which had settled into a frown. They were only supposed to use the suits for six hours at full power, and Henry had already been out for a full ten on half power, taking advantage of the warmer temperature brought by long summer days. Henry had a habit of running his battery down dangerously low, which vexed Gordon to no end.

“If she strays onto Vanguard property, she’ll be thrown into a hopper.” Liquidated—they called it. More like liquefied. Mashed into pellets and turned into feed. “She’s valuable.”

“I don’t like you going close to the property line,” Henry said. “I think you should reassess the value of that asset. We have 29,999 more, at least. I don’t see the point in risking yourself, particularly not when you’re already tired and your strength is flagging.”

“Well, I don’t like you running your power down so low,” Gordon retorted. “I told you to head back three hours ago, yet here you are.”

“If I had gone, who’d stay with the herd while you went after a straggler of dubious monetary value?”

“It’s not about the damn money,” Gordon’s voice betrayed the edge of anger that always reared up when Henry make any remark about his physical stamina. He didn’t like having his limitations pointed out any more than Henry enjoyed Gordon’s incisive commentary on his stubborn nature.

“You’re too tenderhearted about the bugs. It makes you reckless,” Henry chided.

Gordon found that rich, coming from a man who genuinely worried about hurting his robot transport’s feelings.

Gordon sighed and said, “I’m going after her. It shouldn’t take too long.”

Then he tapped the foot control on Paint, and the robot went into cross-country mode. The main body lowered slightly to give Paint’s six legs greater stride and maneuverability. Gordon switched from manual and gave Paint the Bonnie’s signal to target. Then he clamped the legs of his hardsuit firmly to Paint’s sides and away they went, scampering up the crater’s soft side. The MSTIs lifted their heads as he passed by, then went back to grazing.

Just as he reached the rim of the crater, he heard Henry say, “Be careful.”

Once over the rim of the crater, Paint lit out across the boulder-strewn sand at top speed. Gordon hunkered down and hung on, keeping his eye on Paint’s screen. The MSTI really was a mover and seemed determined also to be a trespasser, which Gordon found strange. MSTIs didn’t like being separated from the rest of the herd. Even adventurous ones, who had strong scouting instincts, never ran like this.

Could something be chasing it? But what? New Saturn had no indigenous life. It had the components, minerals and plenty of water—though that was mostly frozen at the poles right now, waiting for the atmosphere generators to finally provide enough greenhouse gasses to heat the surface. But that would happen generations from now.

Now it was just Homestead and Vanguard and the UN reps who refereed their frequent clashes.

As Paint raced to the top of a small rise, Gordon saw tire tracks. But not just any tire tracks. These marks had been made by massive machines plowing directly through the cryptobiotic soil fields he and Henry had seeded the previous year. Huge ruts rent the soil three meters deep in places. Pink soil showed through like gashes in the dark, knobby surface. They’d worked all year to get even that thin layer of cyanobacteria to grow and prosper, and now some asshole had destroyed weeks of work on one destructive joyride.

“Hey, Henry?”

“Yeah, Gordy?” Henry sounded tired but not necessarily apologetic.

“Bad news on the southeast forty.”

“Did you break Paint’s leg in it?”

“No, but I think Vanguard drove their earthmovers right through it.”

Henry swore—which was something he rarely did. Then he said, “Make sure to get—”

“—the documentation,” Gordon finished. “As soon as I find the Bonnie. I think she’s running along one of the ruts.”

“I’m taking the herd back in now. There’s some dust on the eastern horizon that troubles me.”

“Roger that. I’ll see you there.”

Gordon urged Paint down the steep incline and followed for a few more kilometers until he found the Bonnie. The MSTI was trying to climb the side of the rutted wall but the steep, sandy soil kept collapsing beneath her.

Gordon let out a whistle as soon as he thought she was in earshot. The MSTI swiveled her head around to look at him.

“There you are, little girl,” he said in the singsong voice he always used around the bugs. “You come on up here now.”

The MSTI cocked its head and tried again to scale the wall only to fail and come rolling down, curled up into a ball.

“Okay, then, have it your way.” Gordon switched to manual and urged Paint forward. Leaning down, he scooped up the MSTI before she could fully uncurl. Out of reflex, the bug retracted its legs and again curled into spherical defense mode. Which made it easy for Gordon to stuff her in his saddlebag.

He felt a sense of achievement that bordered on joy. He’d saved one more genetically engineered life-form. Never mind that it was probably defective—chasing out cross-country heading toward nowhere. But the MSTI having a screw loose didn’t diminish his pride.

He spent longer than he thought he would documenting the damage, making sure to get good pictures of the tire tracks—just in case. He knew Henry would dutifully file a complaint with the governing board of New Saturn, and that board would turn around and fine Vanguard a stupidly small amount for damages. But if they didn’t file, the harassment would continue.

Vanguard had never been on board with Homestead being allowed to develop human habitation sites for the planet. Not that they were against colonization—far from it. But they preferred to be able to choose which humans were allowed to come down to the planet’s surface and which had to continue the confined existence on the overcrowded chain of space stations that stretched across the galaxy.

Gordon stared up at those rings arching across the vast sky. Up there the space stations teemed with life and bustled with every kind of diversion known to man. But down here he had the whole, empty planet in its geological majesty, silent but for the wind and the sound of Henry’s voice. And he had the weather—the changeable, unstoppable, magnificent forces of day and night and wind and season. Being space-born, Gordon had at first been frightened by the power of it. Now he felt only awe looking at the rising storm on the horizon.

Thinking of it, though, he realized he should get back, before his battery got so low Henry would call him a hypocrite.

The official address was Homestead #99 New Saturn, Chiang System, but Gordon just called it Dome Sweet Dome. It was a series of domes, really, connected by walkways. The entire complex resembled a wagon wheel when viewed from above. Gordon entered on the southeast side, still riding Paint through the unpressurized tunnel that formed the complex’s perimeter until he reached the large dome where the MSTIs bivouacked.

Because the escaped Bonnie, whom he’d dubbed Screw-loose during the long ride back, could have something wrong with her, Gordon went to the quarantine zone. Being super-social, the MSTIs hated being left alone—especially when within scenting distance of the rest of their colony. So Gordon had made the place as comforting as he could, filling it with jointed toy animals painted blue to resemble the MSTIs. He’d also recorded himself singing all the cowboy songs he serenaded the herd with, as well as the weird chirping noises made by Queen Elvira. Still, isolated bugs felt real anxiety and usually chirped all night.

Gordon deposited the Bonnie behind the door. He felt bad about it, but he had to follow the protocols. He then made his way down the next spoke toward the human living quarters at the center. He dismounted Paint and began to remove his hardsuit, though he still wore an armature that helped support his spine and limbs in terrestrial gravity. Light and thin, the armature could have been mistaken for jewelry so long as Gordon wore clothes over it. The rings that helped support his fingers could look especially decorative in certain lights.

Gordon had never thought of it this way until Henry had pointed it out. He still only half believed Henry had any real physical attraction to him, because how could he? Then Henry would prove it with his body, which went a long way toward convincing Gordon it was possible to find a long, thin spaceman beautiful.

Because the day had been so warm, he wore only thin underclothes and these were stained with sweat. As the air lock door opened to the robotics workshop, a chill prickled at his skin.

“Go back to your stall, Paint,” he said. The robot gave a little whinny (which Henry had programmed it to do just for Gordon) and made its way between the tables of equipment to a battery-charging cubby toward the rear of the workshop, adjacent to the living quarters.

Gordon walked down the short hallway to the great room, which contained areas for cooking, eating, and socializing. The central dome sported ten such apartments, each with three bedrooms and private bath facilities, to house the families that would form the farming outpost.

Henry sat at the kitchen table, which was, as always, strewn with small machine parts. He didn’t appear to have cooked any food or showered, but set to tinkering with a machine straightaway. The entertainment center was on and tuned to the latest grav-cross tournament. Santiago seemed to be doing well—coming back from a spine-shattering crash in his last tourney.

“Do I want to have a look at the damage to the cyanobacteria?” he asked as Gordon entered. “Or just file the complaint right away?”

“You probably want to have dinner before you do either,” Gordon went to the refrigerator and surveyed the interior. They had some fresh veg and synth meat and chili paste. “How do you feel about fried rice?”

“I love anything you cook,” Henry said.

Gordon glanced around the edge of the door. Henry seemed sincere—and somewhat apologetic, which Gordon found suspicious.

“Why so sudden with the compliments?”

“I feel bad about saying your bug wasn’t worth enough to go after,” Henry said simply. “I know how attached you are. And they are cute in their own way.”

Gordon closed the door, closed the distance between them, and draped himself across Henry’s shoulders. He wrapped his slender, elongated arms around Henry’s sturdy body and planted a kiss on the side of his neck.

“I know. You were just worried,” Gordon said.

“You take too many risks for a man in your position,” Henry said.

“And just how much battery did you have left when you came back?”

“That’s beside the point,” Henry said.

“I don’t think so. You rely on those suits just as much as me out there.”

Henry shifted to be able to look Gordon in the eye and said, “But you’re more important than me.”

“No, I’m not.”

“You are to me.”

“You’re so sweet when you avoid answering my questions,” Gordon said but gave him another kiss anyway.

After dinner they conserved water by showering together, which was Henry’s stated favorite method of prudent resource management. Then they made their way to bed.

If they’d been in zero gravity, Gordon would have removed the armature to allow more flexibility in their position, but here on the planet’s surface, he didn’t want to force Henry to have to lift his arms and legs for him. He straddled Henry and moved so flesh met flesh without the intrusion of the hard resin that braced his muscle. Henry waited for him to settle, careful as always when Gordon was out of the suit.

Though Gordon had made himself a specialist in taking Henry inside his body, that night he didn’t. They were both too tired for any such procedure and settled for Henry holding both their cocks together between his big hands while Gordon pumped into them and against Henry’s own flesh as well. He hung above Henry, hands braced against the bed on either side of Henry’s shoulders watching his lover’s face.

Henry was a funny one. Gordon could see an idea moving through his mind the second before he decided to move his hands this way or that. A smug look would come over him, and he’d smile just a little so that the dimple showed in his cheek. Then he’d make his sly move, gazing up at Gordon. More often than not he’d say, “You like that?” or “What do you think of this,” or, should he have been tight inside Gordon, he’d be more tender, asking him how he liked it or whether he wanted more or less.

Though the feedback was necessary on account of Gordon’s fragility, answering Henry’s more intimate questions always embarrassed him, while somehow also making the feeling more intense.

Tonight Henry stayed mischievous and systematic, making a production of his motions until finally Gordon broke down and came into Henry’s hands in a series of sharp uncontrollable thrusts. Henry followed soon after, and Gordon rolled back down to the bed beside him—beyond spent yet still once the glow and a few final kisses had been finished—full of worry.

“But we should check on her—secure the enclosure at least.” Gordon started to push himself up, but Henry stopped him.

“You did a lot of riding today. I’ll do it,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“But I’m not singing.”

Gordon was asleep before Henry even left the bedroom.

The shrill pulsing shriek of an alarm sliced through Gordon’s dreams. His eyes flew open. The overhead lights blazed to life while a single flasher whirled yellow and red. Somewhere there had been a breach. Gordon jackknifed into sitting position, but he could see nothing wrong. No wind to indicate pressure escaping the habitat.

“Henry?” Gordon bellowed, his voice barely audible even to his own ears above the alarm.

He staggered to the living room console.

“Silence alarms!” he shouted at the screen. Abruptly the sound ceased. Its absence washed over him like cool water. “Show breaches.”

A diagram flashed on the screen showing two separate breaches: one in the outer spoke near the corral that held the MSTIs and one in the Queen Elvira’s enclosure. He could find no visual for either. Immediately he punched the icon for Henry’s hardsuit communicator.

“Henry, do you copy?” he asked.

No answer came, save some slight static. Heart in his throat, he punched up the vitals for Henry’s hardsuit, Those showed that he was still in it and that his vital signs were within normal range. Though the battery to his communication pack had flatlined and Henry appeared to be moving slowly away from Homestead #99.

What the flying hell?

Gordon loped through the robotics shop, yelling for Paint as he went. The robot scuttled out of its closet to stand at the ready. Paint’s battery charge was still only at 55 percent, as it had been plugged in for only three hours, but it would have to do. He pushed himself into his hardsuit so fast that he missed closing the seams twice.

After the second warning, he forced himself to take a breath. Whatever had happened, it wouldn’t help to get himself decompressed rushing out into the air lock with an unsealed suit like some kind of Earth-born know-nothing. He was a fucking native of space, damn it all. He shouldn’t be acting like this.

Though he felt the slowness of the extra minute might kill him, Gordon forced himself through the safety checklist before opening the air lock.

Outside the night sky shone as the rings formed by accretion discs blazed with blue-white light. Beyond the rings, stars in their millions glittered and danced with the distortion of winds high in New Saturn’s thin atmosphere.

Gordon rushed for the queen’s enclosure and found a rectangle cut into the canvas wall as neatly as if there had been a dotted line to follow.

He put on his external speaker and raised his bolt rifle. “Is there anybody there?”

Nothing. Not a sound.

He gave a whistle—Queen Elvira’s favorite tune, which she always chirped back at him. Again nothing.

Carefully he edged into the enclosure to find nothing. No queen. All at once the knowledge came upon him, and he rushed through the queen’s enclosure to where the rest of the herd was corralled. This too was empty of all MSTIs.

They’d been rustled.

Only one outfit on New Saturn had the ability to steal thirty thousand MSTIs—his old employer, Vanguard—or, more likely, someone bankrolled by them. Gordon did a circuit of the perimeter and easily found the three-toed tracks of several MSTI “dogs” heading southeast.

The dogs were quadruped robots that performed a function much like sheepdogs on Earth. With only a few dogs the rustlers could control tens of thousands of MSTIs—especially if they captured the queen.

But there was no way to drive that many MSTIs over a long distance. They needed water. So there would be a livestock mover somewhere close—perhaps just out of sight.

Gordon accessed his night vision and scanned the horizon.

But about three hundred meters from their homestead, the ground gave way to a frozen lake and the visible tracks disappeared. Gordon did a herd-location scan and discovered that the MSTIs locator chips were, like Henry’s coms, being scrambled by a frequency jammer. Once Gordon got past the soft sand he’d have no way of knowing which direction the rustlers had headed. But they couldn’t have gone far.

He needed some way to track them. Calling the orbital station to request a visual scan of the landscape via satellite would take too long—an hour at least just to get the permission to point the cameras at them. Henry could die any minute from power loss in his hardsuit.

Then Gordon realized he had a tracker.

Screw-loose—the Bonnie in quarantine. She’d followed the Vanguard track earlier.

Gordon wheeled Paint around and galloped to the quarantine. Screw-loose was predictably happy to see him and climbed right up Paint’s leg to butt her head against Gordon’s faceplate.

“I know, I know. I’m sorry to have left you in there. Now you’ve got to help me.”

Gordon knew he couldn’t just trust Screw-loose to come when he called. She’d already wandered off once. So he took a length of lightweight cord and knotted it firmly around Screw-loose’s abdomen. He gave her enough lead to go a couple of meters ahead of him and Paint. Then he went to the caterpillar track and set her down.

Screw-loose didn’t hesitate. She took off after the big machine, yanking on her leash like an eager terrier. Gordon set Paint to follow, and then he did what no human should ever do in this situation—he headed into the darkness alone.

They reached the frozen lake in a matter of minutes. The flat black expanse of its surface stretched for at least five kilometers. Screw-loose hesitated for only a moment before lunging out onto the ice.

Paint followed more cautiously, shifting to adjust its gait on the slick mass. Looking down, though he knew the water to be frozen solid right down to the lakebed, Gordon still felt trepidation crossing the glassy surface.

New Saturn had many lakes and even whole frozen oceans. Many, like this one, were situated near geothermic founts that occasionally melted the water, sometimes all the way to just a few feet below the surface. During these melts, pale gasses became trapped in the dark ice like gleaming bubbles in champagne. Riding across felt like striding through the stars.

Henry would have thought it was beautiful.

For a moment terrible fear for Henry seized Gordon. It was so easy to die in this inhospitable world. But Gordon refused to think that Henry could be lost to him already. He couldn’t have kept going if he did. He had to believe Henry was still alive.

After this was all over, he would show this lake to Henry, he decided. They would come out here together and see the center of this beautiful sight together. Suddenly Paint slid and Gordon lurched, nearly thrown. Gordon held on till Paint righted itself, and they kept going, straight across until they finally neared the far shore. If the sand on the other side showed no tracks they would have to turn around and start again.

Anxiety formed a hard knot in his gut.

He should have called the station, he realized, before setting out. Now he’d gone too far from the signal booster for his suit’s messages to reach orbit.

He nearly cried from relief seeing the familiar pattern of a three-toed dog tracks starting up from the other side.

“Screw-loose, you’re my girl.”

When the MSTI didn’t answer, he whistled a tune. This got her attention for a moment, then she chirped and tried to keep going, but he hauled her back up into his saddlebag. He had the fresh track to follow now.

Once Screw-loose had balled up and been secured, Gordon switched Paint to auto and set the speed for full. They scuttled along the track, kicking up dust behind them until finally a massive machine came into view.

Bigger than their entire living quarters, the livestock mover stood several stories high. It was set on caterpillar treads capable of handling anything the New Saturn terrain could offer as an obstacle. The MSTIs docilely climbed the lowered ramp and filed into the multitiered vehicle. Because the rustlers were most likely used to the cowed and frightened industrially herded MSTIs, they’d only covered the sides of the vehicle with lightweight mesh. It was strong enough to keep the MSTIs from falling out the sides of the mover, but Gordon could see that a few of the bored and mischievous Bonnies had already begun to sample the netting and, finding it weaker than their mandibles, chewed the stuff to pieces.

Once that livestock mover started running, a fair few of them were going to fall out the side and become separated from the herd.

That notion only increased Gordon’s feeling of urgency. He had to stop this mover right here, somehow.

But no way could he simply assault a thing like that. And he had no means of calling the authorities.

He focused his attention on the livestock mover. Though it was possible to automate this entire process, he knew that there must be at least one human here—only high-grade military robots could be programmed to harm humans, and these dogs were definitely on the lower end of retail availability. So at least one human had to have overpowered Henry.

Gordon just needed to find them and work from there.

Could negotiation actually be an option? It would be a ballsy move, but could he bluff the bastards into thinking he’d already relayed their particulars? That a team of marshals would be on their way with the next launch window?

And where was Henry, anyway? Getting him back was the priority, no matter how much Gordon liked Queen Elvira.

Fear coursed through him when he realized there was no guarantee that the rustlers had taken Henry with them. They could have killed him and dumped his body. Gordon might have ridden right past it and never seen it in the darkness.

He reined Paint to a walk and together they crept closer to the livestock mover. A steady stream of MSTIs filed into the mover’s holding tank. When one Bonnie strayed, a dog chased it back into line, blaring a god-awful siren that caused all the MSTIs to cringe.

The loading had only just commenced, it seemed. Gordon could still see Queen Elvira far in the back. He edged along, careful to keep himself and Paint out of the light. Then with a rush of relief he saw Henry. The man was clearly unconscious, hanging over the back of a one of the dogs like a carcass, his limbs bouncing as the dog loped toward the head of the livestock mover.

And there, Gordon saw the operator. He wore a hardsuit and cradled a plasma rifle. Gordon couldn’t see the man’s face, but he instantly recognized the custom paint job decorating the hardsuit. His blood boiled at the sight of the man’s back, sporting the words “Big Shot” topped by a blast pistol firing one suggestive blob of plasma across the boundary of the fiery corona that ringed the entire stupid design.

Gordon could not believe he’d ever slept with this man, nor that he’d once found this hardsuit charming.

Horace Scott ran the MSTI program for Vanguard. Even among the roughnecks who took up terraforming, Horace stood out as the kind of man who’d break any rule or backstab any friend to turn a profit for his corporate masters. Horace was a true believer, and he loathed Homestead for Humanity above all else.

During their last fateful argument, when Gordon had told him that he’d been thinking of leaving Vanguard to join the Homestead organization, whose chief goal was to reduce overcrowding and ease station life, Horace had only said, “New Saturn is a beautiful, unspoiled world. Why would you want to bring down a bunch of station rats to ruin it?”

Gordon wasn’t surprised to find Horace supported sabotage of Homestead properties, but he was curious as to why a man so invested in management that he painted the words “Big Shot” on his back wouldn’t have delegated this dangerous and illegal task to one of his underlings. Then again, maybe he had tried and not been able to convince anyone to do it for him.

The discovery that the rustler was Horace did clarify one thing for Gordon, though. He no longer had any desire to hide in the shadows. Not that he thought Horace wouldn’t shoot him or try to get an EMP on his suit. The sight of the man just made him so hopping mad that he started Paint running before he even had a chance to think.

The dog carrying Henry swiveled around immediately and sounded the alarm. From his place alongside the livestock mover, Horace whipped around and saw Gordon bounding across the pink sand toward him.

It took a couple of seconds for their coms to link frequencies, so when they did Horace was already talking.

“… an idiot thing like this, Gordon?”

“What did you do to Henry?”

“He’s fine. I just gassed him out.”

Paint skidded to a halt beside the dog that held Henry. Looking through the faceplate, he could see that Horace told the truth. Relief coursed through him. But as he reached out to touch Henry, Horace called the dog to him. The robot trotted forward and, at Horace’s command, dumped Henry on the ground at his feet, where he lay like a discarded doll.

Horace brought his rifle to bear on Gordon and Paint immediately, and Gordon stilled and raised his hands.

Now that Gordon came into the circle of light surrounding the livestock mover, some of the MSTIs had caught sight of him and Paint. He turned on his external speakers and could hear them chirping to greet him and gave a long, trilling whistle in return. That triggered a wild cacophony of chirps and whistles from the MSTIs.

Even from three meters away, he could see Horace wince. But glancing to the side he could also see that the MSTIs were gathering at the breach in the netting that had been chewed away by one of the Bonnies.

They had responded to his call. Could he just get them to turn around and go down the ramp? If they all rushed down together, the dogs would be overwhelmed at once.

“You and that lousy whistling,” Horace ground out from between clenched teeth.

“Don’t forget the singing,” Gordon added.

“No way I can forget the singing. I had that stupid song of yours stuck in my head for months after I kicked you out.” Horace hoisted his plasma rifle.

“You didn’t kick me out. I left you.”

“That’s not the way I remember it,” Horace said, as if there were anybody else out here to impress. Maybe he just needed to impress himself.

“You know you’re going to have to give me back these MSTIs,” Gordon said.

“No, I don’t think I do,” Horace said.

“Look, I understand your bosses want us shut down—”

“This isn’t about my bosses. This is about keeping New Saturn unspoiled,” Horace said.

“The point of terraforming is to bring human beings a new world to live on.”

“No, the point of terraforming is to bring deserving human beings a new world. Your Homesteaders are nothing but trash chosen by lottery. They’re unqualified scroungers.”

“You take that back.”

“I didn’t say you were one of them,” Horace said, as though the fact that Gordon included himself among the station rats might be the only real problem with his argument. “But the rest of them—unemployed and lazy. Handing them this place would be like handing a baby over to a pig.”

“It’s not your choice who gets to live here.” Gordon tried to keep his cool. “Look, we’re never going to agree on this, so let’s just call it even. You give me my MSTIs and Henry, and we never need to mention this again.”

“If only I believed you would do that, Gordon, I might take you up on that deal. But you won’t. You’ll be radioing the marshals the second you get within amplification range.”

“How do you know I haven’t already?”

“Because if you had, you’d have told me right away.” Horace flipped a lever on his rifle—setting it to EMP. “I tried to keep you out of this, but you had to come running out into the night like the idiot you are. Now I have to kill you too.”

“What the hell do you mean ‘kill me too’?” Gordon demanded.

“Well, this one was always in the plan.” Horace kicked the side of Henry’s hardsuit.

“What have you got against Henry?” he said. “Far as I know you two have never even met.”

“And yet there his name was at the bottom of every single grievance against me and my crew.” Horace’s voice rose and turned nasty. “Right down to the last one that got me fired.”

“Fired?” Gordon couldn’t keep the amazement from his expression. “How could they shoot down the Big Shot?”

“That’s what I want to know! I’ve done everything—everything those sons of bitches have ever asked of me. And then this guy comes along and I’m out? Terminated? Ordered to leave New Saturn to go live crammed onto some filthy station while this fucker gets this whole planet to roam?” Horace kicked Henry again for good measure.

Gordon understood Horace enough to know that he didn’t mean to ever go back into space.

“So what are you planning to do? Try and buy your way back into the company with my MSTIs? Or do you have another outfit you plan to buy your way into?” Gordon asked, though he supposed he already knew the answer. New Saturn was a big place with plenty of colonial interests. From mining companies to isolationist religious communities to people just like him and Henry.

“Let’s just say that other parties are interested in my services—provided I have something to offer,” Horace replied. He lowered his rifle, taking aim at Henry’s head.

“Wait!”

Horace glanced up but didn’t change his aim. “What? You want to kiss him good-bye or some such thing?” Horace stepped closer to Gordon and angled the rifle at him. “Or maybe you want to go first so you don’t have to see him die?”

“I want you to think about what you’re doing. You can’t shoot me and Henry and expect no one will ever find us.”

“There are plenty of bad guys out here. One of them will be found guilty, I imagine,” Horace said.

Gordon considered his options and decided he only really had one. He jacked up the volume on his hardsuit and began to sing:

I know when this guy is gone

This new world’s gonna be born

You’ll keep rolling along

Tumbling down with the tumbling MSTIs

At once the Bonnie up high in the livestock mover let out an answering chirp and launched herself from the breach in the netting. She curled into a ball mid-fall and bounced to the ground a few feet behind Horace.

Horace whipped around, taking in the spherical creature, then with a single foul utterance, punted the Bonnie back toward the ramp. He looked up just in time to see the next one falling straight toward him. The MSTI nailed him in the shoulder. The third hit immediately after and drove him to one knee.

The MSTIs were on a roll now, shouldering past each other to pour down. The big dog rushed toward Horace but was soon overcome by the MSTIs pouring out in their dozens, bouncing and uncurling.

Pinned now, Horace would be a goner—crushed under the weight. And so would Henry if Gordon didn’t get to him. He urged Paint forward, and the robot bounded across the sands at top speed.

“Attach hardsuit!” Gordon commanded. “Unconscious worker.”

Paint bent and gathered up Henry immediately, clipping Henry’s hardsuit close to its underbelly. Gordon hefted himself into the saddle just as the first wave of blue MSTIs reached him. He hung on for dear life, as Paint scuttled back toward the periphery.

Once at a safe distance, Gordon watched the MSTIs pile up on one another, trying not to look at the cracked hardsuit that he knew no longer protected Horace from New Saturn’s deadly atmosphere.

He whistled for the MSTIs and heard Queen Elvira answer, along with a little echo from Screw-loose in his saddlebag.

All that remained was to lead them all back home.

The inquest into Horace’s death lasted too long. For six weeks Gordon had to sit in the orbital station to answer questions and have his hardsuit recorder examined. Homestead stood by him all the way, paying for his legal representation and even a couple of sessions of counseling. Not that Gordon needed it; except for the claustrophobia he now experienced at being crammed onto an orbiting station with another hundred thousand people, he felt fine.

He missed Henry keenly. And New Saturn’s weather almost as much.

He returned to New Saturn along with the first five families of homesteaders who would jointly take possession of #99. They seemed to be a nice mix of planet and space-born people, and so giddy with excitement about their lives on the new frontier that it brought tears to Gordon’s eyes to watch their awe as the shuttle descended.

Henry met him at the landing site, along with Paint, who Henry claimed had missed him.

“I’ve got a surprise for you,” Henry said. He led Gordon to a new, small dome on the periphery of the compound. Inside Gordon spied the long legs and bulging abdomen of a Queen MSTI—but not Queen Elvira. The new queen swung her head around to him and whistled “Turkey in the Straw.”

“She started metamorphosis into a pupa the day after you left. Turns out Screw-loose had a plan all along,” Henry said. “She was trying to break off and start her own colony.”

“But the MSTIs are not supposed to be able to do this on their own. Their modifications shouldn’t allow it. Did you document it?”

“Isn’t that my line?” Henry asked. He gave a little shrug. “Ours have gone through several generations of natural breeding now. Guess nature found a way.”

“But what about Queen Elvira?”

“They keep their distance from each other,” Henry said with a chuckle. “The bosses want us to split the herd. Take one queen and leave the other for the homesteaders. But I told them I wouldn’t make any decisions till you came back. What do you think?”

A pang of sentiment moved through Gordon as he thought of his years with Queen Elvira. But he felt equally bad forcing her to move. MSTIs were, by nature, a colonizing species. So he put on a brave face and said, “I think it’s time for you, me, and Screw-loose to move on.”

As if she understood, Screw-loose let out a loud chirp, but when Gordon looked over he saw that she was just announcing production of her latest egg.

END

“Oh, Give Me A Home” was originally published in Once Upon a Time in the Weird West (Dreamspinner Press) and is copyright Nicole Kimberling 2016.

This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library.

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Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back soon with a GlitterShip original.

The first time Sir Palamedes is tempted to give up pursuing the Questing Beast, he is tramping through the woods on a bleak winter day, his frosty breath hanging in a white cloud each time he exhales. His feet are sore, and his shoes are worn thin. His horse went lame a week ago, and is returning home in the uncertain care of Palamedes’ squire. Palamedes is following the sound of distant barking, and is beginning to think the sound will drive him mad.

He is far off any beaten track, although he can see the prints of men and horses frozen into the icy turf. They might have been following the Questing Beast themselves, overcome with wonder at a sight that Palamedes is beginning to find commonplace. Or they might have been about some other errand entirely. They might even now be sipping mulled wine by a warm fire at home, rather than tramping through the woods after an abominable beast.

[Full transcript after the cut.]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode #53 for March 29, 2018. This is your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to be sharing these stories with you. Today we have three GlitterShip originals for you: a poem, a piece of flash fiction, and a short story for you. The poem is “Cucumber” by Penny Stirling.

Penny Stirling edits and embroiders in Western Australia. Their speculative fiction and poetry can be found in Lackington’s, Interfictions, Strange Horizons, Heiresses of Russ, Transcendent and other venues. For aroace discussion and bird photography, follow them at www.pennystirling.com or on Twitter @numbathyal.

Cucumber

Penny Stirling

He lullabies my ghosts so I can sleep in,

my life-compeer, my comrade-errant,

and I risk griffin bite for his medicine.

We don’t kiss or act how a couple should

and people enquire: when will we progress?

Surely we’ve been just friends long enough.

We find tracking migrating dragons

more wondrous than our hearts,

entrusting each other’s lives in combat

more significant than vows,

unearthing riddle-hid treasure before rivals

more satisfying than sex;

we are closer than quest-allies

yet less physical than love-couples.

But feelings outside romance have less import

even if we are one another’s most important.

Justfriends.

He doesn’t care, he says. He never cares

what allies or enemies say, he says. I say

enough! My life-partner, my peril-mate,

we are enough. But I just

have had enough. My friend, please:

matching rings, balance-enchanted.

He doesn’t care, either, congratulated

for finally maturing enough.

We don’t kiss or act how a couple should

yet people don’t enquire if we will progress.

Being just spouse and spouse is enough.

END

Izzy Wasserstein teaches English at a midwestern university, writes poetry and fiction, and shares a house with several animal companions and the writer Nora E. Derrington. Her work has recently appeared in or is forthcoming from Clarkesworld, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Pseudopod and elsewhere. She is an enthusiastic member of the 2017 class of Clarion West. She likes to slowly run long distances. Her website is izzywasserstein.com

Ports of Perceptions

Izzy Wasserstein

Chase had come down with both kind of viruses, and worried Hunter had been growing distant, so Hunter suggested they indulge in some PKD. While the drug kicked in, they sprawled on the mattress in Hunter’s flat and exchanged. Hunter’s arm-ports synched with the receivers on Chase’s back and data flowed between them, which they agreed was worth the risk, despite Chase’s cold and the v0x virus still being rooted out by antivi. Chase felt Hunter’s concern turn to desire, and they explored each other and the PKD. Chase unclasped each of their right forearms, then swapped them. Hunter’s arm, which was, or had been, or would be Chase’s, moved over their bodies. They disconnected Hunter’s not-quite-legal sensory enhancer and synched it with Chase’s, and the rush was like data exchange but more immediate, more vivid. They swapped more parts as the sensory loop built between them. Soon Chase cried out for release, but Hunter let anticipation build, feeling Chase’s rising desire, which was Hunter’s. The drug worked on their flesh, their firmware, their coil of tech and limbs; it bypassed the neurons that told Chase which body was Chase’s, which Hunter’s, that told Hunter where Hunter ended and the Universe began; and so they grew into each other, their bodies and consciousnesses spreading from their node across the web. They were together. They were everywhere. When finally they collapsed and held one another, Chase said Hunter’s name, or Hunter said Chase’s, or each said their own. They lay in the tangle of each other, and Chase was Hunter and Hunter’s thoughts were Chase’s, and neither was sure where they ended and reality began. Hunter caught Chase’s cold, or had always had it, or had always been Chase. Neither cared, if indeed they had ever been separate.

END

Amy Griswold is the author (with Melissa Scott) of Death by Silver (winner of the Lambda Literary Award) and A Death at the Dionysus Club, fantasy/mystery novels set in an alternate Victorian England. Her interactive novel The Eagle’s Heir (with Jo Graham) was published in 2017, and their second interactive novel Stronghold, a heroic fantasy game about defending a town and building a community, is forthcoming in 2018.

The Questing Beast

Amy Griswold

The first time Sir Palamedes is tempted to give up pursuing the Questing Beast, he is tramping through the woods on a bleak winter day, his frosty breath hanging in a white cloud each time he exhales. His feet are sore, and his shoes are worn thin. His horse went lame a week ago, and is returning home in the uncertain care of Palamedes’ squire. Palamedes is following the sound of distant barking, and is beginning to think the sound will drive him mad.

He is far off any beaten track, although he can see the prints of men and horses frozen into the icy turf. They might have been following the Questing Beast themselves, overcome with wonder at a sight that Palamedes is beginning to find commonplace. Or they might have been about some other errand entirely. They might even now be sipping mulled wine by a warm fire at home, rather than tramping through the woods after an abominable beast.

The trees are thinning, and through them Palamedes can see the rutted track of a road. It will be easier walking, and surely he can pick up the trail of the Beast again later. Nothing else leaves such tracks, shaped like the hoofprints of a deer but dug deep into the turf under its monstrous weight. Nothing else makes such a clamor, like a pack of hounds gone mad with no answering music of horns.

He smells smoke before he sees the little camp by the side of the road. A horse is picketed and cropping at the thin brown grass, and a man is warming his hands over the fire. His shield is propped against a log, and it is by the arms more than by his travel-dirtied face that Palamedes knows him: Sir Tristan, who swore to kill Palamedes when they last met.

They have been sworn enemies for years, for reasons that begin to seem increasingly absurd. Once when Palamedes was a light-hearted youth, Iseult the Fair smiled at him, and he supposes that explains why he and Tristan must be enemies, even though Iseult has long since wedded Mark of Cornwall in obedience to her duty. He suspects that competing for a lady’s adulterous favors is less than the true spirit of chivalry.

And yet he pauses, thinking of Iseult with sunlight on her hair, her face tipped up to him as she asked him curiously about distant Babylon which he will never see again. She did not scorn him for keeping faith with the gods of his childhood. Perhaps she would never have married a pagan, but there can be no question of marriage, now. If Tristan fell, and he were there to bring her the comfort she would not seek in her unloving husband’s arms …

But these are unworthy thoughts. If he steps out of the woods and declares himself, it will be to meet Tristan in battle as Tristan has long desired. Tristan looks cold and drawn, clearly the worse for his travels, but surely no more so than Palamedes himself. Tristan has been riding, not walking, his heavy cloak not frayed to shreds and his boots not worn parchment-thin. It would be a fair fight, surely.

The sound of hounds baying rises over the woods, a wild familiar clamor. Tristan lifts his head, gazes into the trees for a moment, and then turns back to warming his hands, like a man too weary to think wonders any of his concern.

Palamedes turns and sees the Questing Beast through the trees, distant but clear, its serpent’s neck outstretched, its heavy leopard’s body, from which the barking of hounds perpetually sounds, crouching balanced on its cloven hooves. The beast itself is mute, no sound coming from its throat even when it opens its mouth as if to taste the air.

The voice that whispers in his head is an older one, the goddess of his childhood, Anahita-of-the-beasts. Or perhaps there is no voice at all, only the familiar sound of his own thoughts, his only companion on his long road.

Will you keep faith with him, or with your oath? it asks.

He swore to follow the Beast, and not only at his leisure. Palamedes turns his back on the fire, the fight, and the ease of following the road, and follows the Questing Beast, quickening his steps as the Beast begins to run.

The second time Sir Palamedes is tempted to stop pursuing the Questing Beast, he is riding down a well-traveled road on a warm summer evening. He has met with many travelers, and answered their courteous inquiries with the tale of his quest, which is becoming wearisome to tell. Most of them look at him as if he is mad, which is not entirely out of the question.

The tracks of the Beast are dug deep into the mud beside the road, and he does not fear losing its trail, though it must be a day or more ahead of him. It will sleep, for the night, and so must he. He turns his horse’s head from the road into a meadow beside a running stream. Another traveler is camped there already, and as Palamedes dismounts he prepares to tell his story once again.

Tristan emerges from his tent, stops as he recognizes Palamedes, and stands staring, apparently at a loss for words. He looks well-fed and well-rested this time, and certainly fit for a duel. But it feels a bit ridiculous at this point to call themselves mortal enemies, having rescued each other from perils that interfered with their duel to the death so many times that it’s clear neither of them relishes having the duel at all.

“Well met, Sir Tristan,” he says. “May I share your camp, or must we settle our differences on the field of arms first?”

“I expect it can wait until morning,” Tristan says. “Sit and have some dinner.”

They share a roasted grouse and sit chewing over the bones as the stars come out.

“You’ve never told me how you came to hunt the Questing Beast,” Tristan says.

He supposes he hasn’t, although it feels as if he’s told the tale to everyone in England. “Sir Pellinore was growing old,” he says. “But he said he couldn’t lay down his charge until there was a man willing to take it up, and he wouldn’t lay such a thing on his sons.”

“So he laid it on you? That seems sharp dealing.”

“I offered to do it,” Palamedes says. “And I suppose he thought as a stranger to these shores I wouldn’t be leaving a home and responsibilities behind.” He shrugs. “I don’t regret it.”

“You’ve had little chance of winning a lady this way, though,” Tristan says, as close as Palamedes thinks they will come to speaking of Iseult. He wonders how many years it has been since Tristan has seen her. “Surely that must come hard.”

“One hardly misses what one has never had,” Palamedes says. The memory of Iseult is a distant dream. The reality is this, the road, the quest, and the sometime company of other knights who are willing to go some distance down his unending road at his side. “If I have been deprived of the favors of fair ladies, I have had the friendship of the most gallant of knights.”

“I hope you count me among them,” Tristan says, and Palamedes does, although he is aware they still might end by shedding each other’s blood on the thirsty earth.

“I would be honored,” he says, and reaches out a hand to clasp Tristan’s. The other man’s hand is rough and warm in his, the pulse beating hard under the skin. It is a warm night full of possibilities. He pulls Tristan toward him for a kiss he does not intend as brotherly.

Tristan turns his head, and it ends up a brotherly salute after all. “You know I am a Christian knight,” he says. Palamedes spreads his hands to grant that Tristan’s god may be more forgiving of adultery than of other sins of the flesh. The blood is high in Tristan’s cheeks all the same, his eyes intent. “If you were a Christian as well …”

Palamedes breathes a laugh. “Then you would feel it justified?”

“Well so, if it brought you to Christ.”

It is a high-handed offer, and a perverse one, and still for a moment tempting. Of all men, there are few he respects as much as Tristan, and few whose company he desires as much. “And would you then bear me company on my quest?”

“I think you would find if you accepted baptism that there were other quests more worth the pursuing,” Tristan says. “Whether the Grail or the peace of a Christian marriage and a family.” There is wistfulness in his voice when he speaks of such comforts, which certainly Tristan has never had himself.

For a moment Palamedes is tempted himself to agree. He does not regret his quest, it is true, but it is growing ever difficult to remember why it matters. Friendship and ease would surely be worth putting himself in the bleeding hands of the Christian god.

There is a breath of noise that might be the murmuring of the brook, but he knows it for the distant sound of hounds barking, barely a whisper on the wind.

Are you his or mine? a voice says in the quiet of his heart, the warm implacable voice of Anahita-of-the-winds with her outstretched hands.

“I can only be as I am,” Palamedes says, and stands. “And I have tarried here too long. If I ride through the night, I can at least get closer to my quarry.” He bows to Tristan. “We can fight next time we meet.”

“I will look forward to it,” Tristan says quite courteously, and Palamedes swings himself up to the saddle and turns his horse’s head into the darkness.

The third time Palamedes is tempted to stop pursuing the Questing Beast, he dismounts to drink at a forest stream in a crisp autumn, and raises his head to see the Questing Beast on the other side of the stream, its head bent to the water.

It is silent while drinking, as if the water calms the maddened hounds who howl from its belly. Palamedes reaches silently for the bow hung from his saddle, and fits an arrow to the string. He draws it back, aiming for the Beast’s heart. One clean shot will bring it down, and end his quest forever.

The Beast’s eyes are closed as if in pleasure at the taste of the cool water. Its sinuous neck lowers, and it settles down on its haunches, resting in the mossy bank. It must be an effort to support that bulk on ill-fitted hooves, and to sleep with the noise of baying eternally in its own ears.

It is the child of a human woman, or so Pellinore told him, the child of a liar who lusted after her own brother and lay with a demon to win him. It will never have a mate or a home. He thinks for a moment that he knows how it must feel.

But Palamedes has friends he has loved well, and the satisfaction of having mended a hundred small hurts while on the road: he has fought monsters and found lost sheep, brought stray children back to their mothers and jousted with menacing giants. The road has been more a reward to him than a punishment. He wonders which it is for the Beast, and knows that he will never know.

Palamedes puts down the bow and stoops to fill his cupped hands with water. The Beast startles at the movement, raising its serpentine head and staring at him with its unblinking eyes, its whole body poised for flight.

He holds out his hands to it, and the Beast takes one step into the water, and then another, and then lowers its head to drink. Its flickering tongue is warm. It stands quietly, trusting, and Palamedes knows that this is a wonder no other man has seen before him.

Would the Grail be better? a voice asks, the teasing voice of Anahita-of-the-waters.

“You know it would not,” he says aloud. The Beast raises its head sharply at the sound, the clamor of barking beginning again. It whips its bulk around and springs away, the barking retreating through the underbrush.

Palamedes bends to drink, and then mounts his horse again, turning its head toward the sound of baying hounds. It is a long afternoon’s pursuit through the cool clear autumn air, the leaves turning to all the colors of a tapestry lit by dancing flames.

The trees thin at the edge of the wood, and when he comes out onto the road, he is somehow unsurprised to see a familiar knight riding under a familiar banner. Tristan’s face is set in lines of frustration, and Palamedes supposes that he has been trying to persuade Iseult to run away with him again, as suitably impossible a quest as any.

“Well met, Sir Tristan,” he says, falling in beside him on the road. “May I ride a little ways with you, or must we stop to have our battle?”

“We might ride on a little ways beforehand,” Tristan says. He smiles, and some few of his cares seem to lift from him. “Have you given more thought to baptism since last we met? It seems to me you were undecided when we spoke before.”

“I was not, and I am not,” Palamedes says. “But you may go on trying to persuade me.” He spurs his horse on to a faster walk, knowing soon enough he will have to turn away from the road toward the sound of distant baying. But for now he has a good road underfoot, and on such a fine day, he cannot think of any road he would rather be traveling.

END

“Cucumber” is copyright Penny Stirling 2018.

“Ports of Perceptions” is copyright Izzy Wasserstein 2018.

“The Questing Beast” is copyright Amy Griswold 2018.

This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library.

You can support GlitterShip by checking out our Patreon at patreon.com/keffy, subscribing to our feed, or by leaving reviews on iTunes.

I have ridden dinosaurs. Big, bitey ones. I’ve traveled on the Hindenburg, fought alongside Joan of Arc, punched Jack the Ripper right in the face.

The point I’m trying to make is being a time traveler puts you in some scary situations, but this is easily the most terrifying.

Asking out a pretty girl.

(Insert shriek of terror here.)

I’ve been putting it off, shoving it to that dusty place in the back of my mind where I keep things I’m afraid of—like the fact that house centipedes exist—but it has to be now, before she goes back home.

I take a deep breath, my heart beating like a drum roll, and step into the lab.

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip for March 9, 2018. This is your host Keffy, and I’m super excited to be sharing these stories with you. First things first: if you’re listening to this episode when it comes out, you have until March 12, 2018 to get a great deal on the ebook of GlitterShip Year One. This anthology collects every GlitterShip story that came out between our launch and the end of 2016 and is on sale for just $2.99. You can pick it up direct from the GlitterShip website at glittership.com/buy, on Kindle, Nook, or Kobo.

Today I have three short reprints for you.

The first is Corvus the Mighty by Simon Kewin

Simon Kewin was born and raised on the misty Isle of Man in the middle of the Irish Sea, but he now lives in the English countryside with his wife and their daughters. He is the author of over a hundred published short stories and his works have appeared in Analog, Nature, Daily Science Fiction, Abyss & Apex and many more. His cyberpunk novel The Genehunter and his Cloven Land fantasy trilogy were recently published and his clockpunky novel Engn is to be published by Curiosity Quills Press in 2018. Find him at simonkewin.co.uk.

Corvus the Mighty

by Simon Kewin

Gedric found the ramshackle hut half way up the hillside. He tethered his horse, the best they’d been able to spare, to one of the low stone walls marking the garden out from the sweep of sloping land. He stood and waited to be spoken to. The man he’d come to find, stripped to the waist, powerful but grey-haired now, dug a trench in the heavy soil with rhythmic swings of his shoulders. The man didn’t speak, didn’t appear to have even noticed his visitor.

Gedric had grown up with tales of him. They all had: the exploits of Corvus, Corvus and his trusty Shieldsman Way, were the stuff of children’s bedtime stories and mead-hall roister. Corvus, who had saved the seven clans again and again, defeated marauding nightmares then drunk for a week to celebrate. And now here he was, tilling the reluctant peat of this desolate hillside, this man who could have lived out his days in golden palaces had he chosen to.

While he waited, Gedric turned away to look out over the land. Now that he saw Corvus in the flesh, his doubts returned. Could one old man really save them? He regretted this fool’s errand more and more. He should be down there, fighting the invaders. At least he’d be doing something. Dimly, in the far distance, he could make out a line of smoke cutting into the sky. Some homestead or town burning. Impossible to say where from up there. But it might be Ravn. Ravn, with its walls of spiked pine trunks and its stone tower. Ravn where he’d left Eliane two days earlier, vowing he’d return with help. The invaders had been sighted even as he’d galloped away. Was she still alive? She and their child she carried within her? Were any of the people he’d grown up with still alive? He imagined her calling out his name in desperation as she died, surrounded by shrieking bone-men.

Corvus speared his shovel into the earth as if it were a beast he had slain. He regarded Gedric, an irritated look on his lined face. His chest heaved from his exertions.

“I come in search of Corvus the War Chief, Lord of the Seven Clans,” said Gedric.

“Have you now? Well, you’ve come a long way for nothing, boy.”

Gedric had been warned Corvus had turned his back on everything he’d been. Wanted only peace and solitude now. This reaction was only what he’d expected.

“My lord, the clans are in great need,” said Gedric, giving him the speech he’d practiced in his head as he rode up the hill. “The bone-men have come out of the west, hundreds of their white ships making landfall on the coast to pillage and destroy. We fight them, but they keep coming, more and more every day.”

“Sorry to hear it. At least they shouldn’t bother me all the way up here.”

“But the clans, my lord. They fall, village by village, town by town. Soon there will be none of us left.”

The man shook his head.

“And I told you. I’m not the man you’re looking for.”

“But you could be him once more, my lord. You are still Corvus. You could unite the clans, lead us against the foe.”

The old man laughed. He looked up at the sky in the manner of farmers and homesteaders everywhere, assessing the chances of rain.

“Young fool, I mean I’m really not him. Corvus died six winters ago.”

Gedric smiled. He’d been told to expect this, too.

“You mean, he died and this humble crofter I see before me was born at the same moment. I understand your desire for solitude, Corvus, but times are desperate.”

“I mean he died, boy. Corvus the Mighty, Lord of the Seven Clans and so on and so on. He gave up his ghost. In his sleep. He was just a ragbag of wounds by the end, anyway. Couldn’t feed or clean himself. Don’t mention that in the sagas, do they?”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I’ll show you his mighty bones if you like, buried on the hilltop.” The man nodded up the slope. Gedric saw the line of a well-worn path leading up there.

“But I don’t understand. Everyone I spoke to said Corvus lived here. And here you are. Yet you claim you’re not him.”

“I am not Corvus.”

“Then who are you?”

“Are you really the brightest one they could find? My name is Way, boy. Obviously.”

“No, but, I’m sorry, Way was a small man. Clever and agile as a cat. It’s in all the sagas.”

“Let me tell you something about storytellers,” said the old man. He looked around in an exaggerated way, as if there were anyone within thirty leagues who could overhear. “The thing is this. They make things up. That’s what they do, what they’re for. I can assure you I am Way. I should know. I’ve been me all my life. And for the record, I was a hand taller than Corvus. Better swordsman too, truth be told.”

Gedric had never even wondered what had happened to Way. He was just the constant companion in the tales: the one who broke into the dungeons to rescue Corvus the night before he was to be executed, or who cut his ropes when the Pirate Kings thought they had him bound and trapped belowdecks.

“But I don’t understand, Corvus came here for peace and solitude. Everyone knows that. And yet here you are. What, you came up here to rescue him from these ferocious sheep?”

The old man shook his head.

“I see the storytellers got that wrong, too. We came here for peace and solitude. They have me as, what, Corvus’s faithful companion? His servant?”

“His Shieldsman.”

The man laughed. “Do you really think we could have stood each other all that time if we’d been just comrades? Or master and servant? The world was ours to roam together. I was his lover, not some Shieldsman. Ah, he was a beautiful man in his youth, let me tell you. People would do anything for that smile of his. I know I did.”

A weight of dread filled Gedric at these words. Corvus had been their last hope. A remote hope, to be sure. He thought of Eliane and the bright, fearless look on her face. The swell of her belly. Her gentle touch.

“Then I am sorry,” said Gedric. “You have lost a lot more than just a hero.”

Way shrugged. “We had our time together, down there in the world and up here in the quiet afterwards. It barely matters now. He’s gone. Isn’t a day goes by I don’t miss him, but pining won’t bring him back, will it? Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get these stonefruits planted before the rains come. Make yourself useful and I’ll let you rest here the night. You can leave in the morning.”

Unable to think of anything else to say to the old man, Gedric climbed over the wall to help.

That night, Gedric lay on a mattress of springy heather beneath the furs Way had provided. The old man was outside somewhere, tending to his tatty, distrustful sheep. Gedric sighed. He had failed in his quest to find Corvus, failed to bring him triumphantly back to the clans. They would all die now, sooner or later.

He leafed through the sheaf of dispatches he’d brought with him: descriptions of the skirmishes fought against the bone-men, plans for future battles. He sought good news, some flaw they’d missed, some new strategy they could adopt. He found nothing. The bone-men came in their hundreds and left behind a trail of the dead and dying. Gedric read for an hour or more by the flickering light of Way’s fire until his eyes began to prickle. Exhausted by his journey, by his labor in the field, he lay back and fell asleep.

He woke to rain drumming on the wooden roof of the hovel. He thought, still half-asleep, the bone-men had come for him, had set fire to their house. Imagined Eliane there beside him, reaching for her axe to fight off the invaders. But when he opened his eyes, he was alone. It was early morning, the inky darkness outside just beginning to shade to purple. Embers of the fire glowed orange in the old man’s hearth.

It took Gedric a moment to realise the despatches were gone, plucked from his hand as he slept.

How could he have been so foolish? The details they contained would be invaluable to their foe. He had vowed never to let them out of his sight, had been allowed to travel with them only in the hope they might goad Corvus into action. Now Way had them. If he really was Way. Perhaps he was someone in league with the bone-men, set up there as a trap. Alarm hammered through Gedric at what he had done.

He rose, quickly, thinking to chase after the man, catch up with him. He would be hours away by now. Gedric stood there in the early morning chill, naked, trying to decide what he should do.

“You’re in a sudden hurry, boy.”

The man sat unseen in a shadowy corner of the room. Gedric heard the rustling of paper.

“Return the despatches to me,” said Gedric.

The old man ignored him. “Tell me, who commands the warbands now?”

“Each clan chief leads their own.”

“Well, they’re all fools. See here, they turn and face the bone-men with the river to their backs. And here, again, in the High Passes, where scree-falls can easily be set off to crush a pursuing enemy, nothing is done. The warbands flap around like gaggles of geese.”

“We do what we can. There are too many of the enemy.”

The man stood and stepped out of the shadows into the orange glow from the fire. He wore full armor. Gedric recognized it immediately.

“So … you are Corvus after all.”

The man looked at him for a moment, not speaking. He shook his head.

“No. I am Way. Didn’t I tell you? But I kept his armor, boy. That’s all I have left of him. I get it all out and buckle it on sometimes. Had to loosen the straps a little. Ridiculous, I know, but it makes me feel he’s still here, makes me feel close to him again.”

“You miss him.”

Way shrugged. “Also I look rather good in it. Don’t you think?”

“You look like Corvus.”

“That’s what you see?”

“I … I thought you were him, stepping out from the sagas. That armor with those crows emblazoning it.”

“Good.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you saw that, others will see it too,” said Way. “They’ll see what they need to see. All those stories about us. A lot of it was just people believing in us, believing in him: the black-haired hero who always won, despite the ridiculous odds.”

“You’ve decided to help us now?”

“I read your despatches,” said Way. “The bone-men. I thought you were just some lad who’d seen one battle and run for the hills. But you’re right. The clans need Corvus once more.”

“You mean, you’re going to pretend to be him?”

“Riding out of the old tales, just when the clans need him most. Don’t you see, boy? The story is irresistible. The bone-men won’t have a chance. And … I would see Corvus at the head of the warbands once more. In a manner of speaking.”

“Can this work?”

“I won’t tell anyone if you don’t. They’ll want to believe I’m Corvus. Now get dressed, boy.” Way glanced down and back up, an amused grin flashing across his face. “I can see from here how cold you are.”

Gedric began to struggle into his clothes. Way pulled Corvus’s helmet over his head and the illusion was complete.

“Come,” said Way, his voice muffled by the helmet. Changed. “Let us ride. We can’t just sit around on this hillside when the clans need us.”

Together they stepped out into the morning light. The rain had passed over now and shafts of sunlight lit the world. The whole land lay stretched out before them, like a map waiting to be drawn on. Way opened the little wooden gate that kept his sheep penned up, giving the creatures their freedom.

“Will we have a chance?” Gedric asked. “Is there really any hope?” The fate of all the clans depended on this old man, but he could think only of Eliane. Eliane and their child.

Way laughed. “The situation is hopeless, the odds ridiculous. How can we fail? We will ride to Ravn and rally their defences. And then we will ride to every other town. The story of the return of Corvus will spread like a fire across the land and we will be unstoppable.”

Then Way—Corvus—nodded, climbed onto his horse and set off down the hill to do battle.

END

Next we have “Pastel Witch” by Jacob Budenz.

Jacob Budenz is a writer and multi-disciplinary performer whose work has been published by Assaracus, Hinchas de Poesia, Polychrome Ink, The Avenue, and more. Currently, Jacob resides in New Orleans in pursuit of an MFA in Creative Writing.

Pastel Witch

by Jacob Budenz

Where wealth is measured by the pinkness of the sky there is a man standing at the window wearing a yellow sundress as dusk descends. His lips are lavender. His toenails match. His fingernails match. He does not wear shoes.

Where teeth hang from the doorway by silver thread and tinkle in the breeze the man crushes daisies with a mortar and pestle. The teeth are his own and he has grown them back and torn them out, grown them back and torn them out, grown them back, year after year after year after year. From his kitchen he can see the lake ripple, the mountains lean in. He is pregnant with his third child. The father is the wind.

Where the moss is a pillow and the tree is a lamp, the man will give birth to his daughter and hand the baby to the queen of the crickets. The child will return once she has learned to fly and to sing. She will be thirteen years old, then. In the mean time the man will weep once a week for the first two years, once a month for the next four, twice a year for the next three, only once the next year, never again until she returns. When his daughter returns he will tell her he never wanted any sons. Both his sons died before learning to fly, he will tell her. This is a lie. He had one daughter and one son before her. They are still alive, and have turned into a narwhal and a beetle, respectively.

Where the water is warm he will never swim. He does not know how to swim. Yet here he lives in a house by the lake, here he lives in a house by the lake. The sun has gone down, and the banshees are smiling, and he swears he will never drink a drop of liquor again, after tomorrow morning.

END

Finally, we have “Do-Overs” by Jennifer Lee Rossman

Jennifer Lee Rossman is a science fiction geek from Oneonta, New York, who enjoys cross stitching, watching Doctor Who, and threatening to run over people with her wheelchair. Her debut novel, Jack Jetstark’s Intergalactic Freakshow, will be published by World Weaver Press in 2019. She blogs at jenniferleerossman.blogspot.com and tweets @JenLRossman.

Do-Overs

by Jennifer Lee Rossman

I have ridden dinosaurs. Big, bitey ones. I’ve traveled on the Hindenburg, fought alongside Joan of Arc, punched Jack the Ripper right in the face.

The point I’m trying to make is being a time traveler puts you in some scary situations, but this is easily the most terrifying.

Asking out a pretty girl.

(Insert shriek of terror here.)

I’ve been putting it off, shoving it to that dusty place in the back of my mind where I keep things I’m afraid of—like the fact that house centipedes exist—but it has to be now, before she goes back home.

I take a deep breath, my heart beating like a drum roll, and step into the lab.

She’s bent over a laptop, her dark hair falling over her little serious face, dressed in jeans and a V-neck that are a far cry from the silks and gowns a countess would wear in her era. She makes my skin feel warm just looking at her.

“So,” she says as I approach. “I’ve run a final check on the new operating system and it all looks good. I’ve worked out the kinks that caused that paradox, but there are a few new guidelines I want to run by you—”

I love the way she says paradox in her accent, with a long O sound that makes her lips get all round and pouty. Like when she says my name.

“Roz?”

I blink and look up from her lips.

“Roz, did you hear a word I said?”

My nod is a vigorous, enthusiastic lie.

“Then if you want to test your machine—”

“You’re gorgeous.”

Her entire face stops like someone paused her video in mid-word and I just want to melt into a puddle of embarrassment.

“I’m… gorgeous,” she repeats, her voice devoid of any inflection that would help me know how to fix this. Should I take it back? That seems offensive. Maybe I should tell her I don’t mean it in a gay way?

But I do. I mean it in the gayest way possible. I mean it as the start of a relationship that will lead to us getting married in matching princess dresses and having babies and operating our own time travel business and—

Time travel. Duh.

“You know what?” I say, holding my hands up. “Let me try this again.”

I leave her to her bewilderment and step outside. I set my wristwatch time machine back two minutes, and a blue glow envelops me. When it subsides, I go back in to find her bent over the laptop again.

She looks up when she sees me. “So…”

“Do you like girls?” I interrupt, because I am just the smoothest. When she doesn’t answer right away, I add, “I do. And boys. And, in one very confusing instance, a cartoon fox. But the girl part is the most relevant now because I like you.”

Facepalm.

Out the door I go without another word, and back in time with a blue glow. We never used to have a blue glow; must be one of her improvements to the system.

This time, I go in with a plan, and that plan is poetry. What girl can resist wordplay!

And I have the perfect poem in mind. Before she can say anything, I launch into a passionate recitation. “Maid of Athens, ‘ere we part. Give, oh, give me back my heart!”

Her initial amusement slips from her face, leaving her looking confused and… is that a teensy bit of disgust?

“Or since that has left my breast,” I continue, “take it now and leave the rest. Hear my vow—”

Oh, no.

I just remembered who wrote the poem.

Ada’s perfect eyebrows knit together. “Roz, are you trying to woo me with a poem written by my father?”

“Yes. Luckily, I’m about to change history so you won’t remember any of this when I get back,” I say, and dash out the door. I do the Time Warp again.

Okay. Focus.

I breathe slow, deep breaths and think of exactly what I want to say. I got Napoleon and Josephine together when a time rift erased the day they met. If I can do that, I can totally do this.

…is what I tell myself so I don’t throw up.

“Hello, Miss Lovelace,” I say this time, trying to stay calm despite a raging blush that has to be visible from space. “Do you have a moment to talk about something important?”

Ada is leaning over a closed laptop, a knowing smile on her strawberry cream lips (she borrowed my flavored lip gloss, so I know her kiss will be delicious). A jolt runs through me – does she want to talk about what I want to talk about? But she says, “Yes, I think we should go over some of the new features of your operating system before I leave,” and I deflate just a tiny bit.

Did I imagine all the glances she stole when she thought I wasn’t looking? The flirtastic banter during all the late nights we stayed up coding? All the times her hands drifted from the keys and found my hand for no reason except that we’re so obviously the leads in a romantic comedy?

I bite my lip and join her at the table. My confidence fizzles out like candles on a forgotten birthday cake, but I have to try.

“Ada—”

“One of the changes I’ve made,” she interrupts, resting her chin in her hands, “will hopefully prevent paradoxes.” Pouty lips on paradoxes.

I mirror her posture and pay attention this time.

She speaks slowly, like she’s teasing me with information. “I’ve implemented a safeguard to keep time travelers from interfering with their own timelines.”

Wait.

“If you try to go back and change your own history, the machine won’t work. I’ve set it to flash a blue glow instead of an alarm.”

But that would mean…

“So, for example, if you wanted to undo your embarrassing attempts at confessing your feelings, the girl would see you walk out the door, only to return a few seconds later to try again.”

Oh.

Oh no.

Frost replaces my heated blush as my blood cools to the temperature of a cherry slushie.

Can you die from awkwardness?

My mouth hangs open in horror, which somehow makes it all the more awkward when she leans forward to kiss me. All at once, my warmth returns, and I wish she hadn’t made it impossible to go back in my own timeline.

Because I want to relive this moment over and over again.

END

“Corvus the Mighty” was originally published in Vitality Magazine and is copyright Simon Kewin 2015.

“Pastel Witch” was originally published in The Light Ekphrastic and is copyright Jacob Budenz 2015.

“Do-Overs” was originally published in Spectrum Lit and is copyright Jennifer Lee Rossman 2017.

This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library.

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